The Effects of Untying International Food Assistance: The Case of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most donor countries historically linked international food assistance programs to their domestic agricultural support policies through tying policies that required donated food to be purchased in donor‐country markets. Tying policies have been shown to reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of food assistance along a number of dimensions, including cost, timeliness, and cultural appropriateness. We investigate how the Canadian policy to untie food assistance affected Canadian shipments. We use an operation‐level dataset from the World Food Programme to investigate how procurement sources and commodity compositions changed after untying, and we build an empirical model of Canadian food assistance shipments that is used to compare observed shipments to counterfactually‐tied shipments. This comparison reveals positive effects of the untying policy at the extensive margin (number of recipient countries) and no significant effects at the intensive margin (quantity of food) when estimated over our entire sample. We observe positive effects of untying at the intensive margin (quantity of food) when comparing shipments during the untied regime to shipments in years directly preceding the policy change. Our results show that Canada delivered more emergency food assistance, more frequently, after untying. The results of the Canadian experience inform ongoing debates about untying food assistance in the United States and untying other forms of foreign aid.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".