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The Nigerian government uses food import prohibition as part of policies that seeks to protect existing domestic producers and reduce the country's dependence on imports. This paper argues that such policies have negative effects on net consumers of such products due to higher prices. With 70 percent of poor households' budget spent on food, and about 13 percent of the total budget devoted to products subject to import bans, poor households are vulnerable to such trade policies. Prices of some import prohibited food products are found to be higher than what they would be in the absence of such bans. The elimination of import bans is estimated to reduce national poverty rates by as much as 2.6 percentage points.

AbstractThis paper examines the effect of the intensity, timing and persistence of personal history of mobility on individual support for redistribution. Using both rounds of the Life in Transition Survey, we build measures of downward mobility for about 57,000 individuals from 27 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We find that more intensive, recent and persistent downward mobility increases support for redistribution. Accounting for systematic bias in perceived mobility experience and omitted variable bias and considering alternative definitions of redistributive preferences do not alter the basic results.