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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

Ahmed Akhter

researcher spotlight

Akhter Ahmed

Akhter Ahmed is a Senior Research Fellow in the IFPRI’s Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit and Country Representative for IFPRI Bangladesh. He has worked on strategies for agricultural and rural development, social protection, and women’s empowerment to reduce poverty, food insecurity, and undernutrition in developing countries including Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Malawi, the Philippines, and Turkey.

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Since 1975, IFPRI’s research has been informing policies and development programs to improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods around the world.

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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experts

Director General’s Office (DGO)

Sherman Robinson

Research Fellow Emeritus

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Bio

Sherman Robinson is a Research Fellow Emeritus in the Director General’s Office and Professor of Economics (retired), University of Sussex. He served as the Director of  IFPRI’s Trade and Macroeconomics Division from 1993 to 2004, and as an and Institute Fellow. He later rejoined IFPRI as a Senior Research Fellow in 2011.

Professor Robinson is a leading expert on global and national economic simulation models, particularly computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, which have become a standard tool of analysis to assess the economic impact of climate change, trade and fiscal policy, regional integration, structural adjustment, and development strategies. His research interests include the use of global economic models for scenario analysis on issues of climate change, international trade, economic growth, agricultural and resource issues, climate change adaptation, macroeconomic policy, income distribution, and maximum-entropy econometrics applied to estimation problems in developing countries.

Before joining IFPRI in 1993, he was Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley; Economist, Senior Economist and Division Chief in the Research Department of the World Bank; Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University; and Lecturer in Economics at the London School of Economics. He joined the Economics Department at the University of Sussex in 2004 and accepted a joint appointment with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex one year later. He has been a consultant to the World Bank and has held visiting senior-staff appointments at the Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture; the U.S. Congressional Budget Office; and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (in the Clinton administration), where he largely worked on trade issues, including regional trade agreements, GATT/WTO negotiations, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Publications

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Publications

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Book Chapter

Agrifood trade: Changing challenges, changing perspectives on policy and policy research

2025Díaz-Bonilla, Eugenio; Gautam, Madhur; Glauber, Joseph W.; Martin, Will; Piñeiro, Valeria; Robinson, Sherman; Traoré, Fousseini; Vos, Rob
Details

Agrifood trade: Changing challenges, changing perspectives on policy and policy research

Agrifood trade plays a key role in ensuring food security, providing smallholders and rural traders with better prices for their products in bigger and higher-value markets, improving efficiency in the production and use of natural resources, and increasing consumer access to safer and more diversified and nutritious foods. This chapter reviews the evolution of trade research, with a focus on the contributions made by IFPRI and others, as well as priorities for future research. Book link: https://hdl.handle.net/10568/174108

Year published

2025

Authors

Díaz-Bonilla, Eugenio; Gautam, Madhur; Glauber, Joseph W.; Martin, Will; Piñeiro, Valeria; Robinson, Sherman; Traoré, Fousseini; Vos, Rob

Citation

Díaz-Bonilla, Eugenio; Gautam, Madhur; Glauber, Joseph W.; Martin, Will; Piñeiro, Valeria; et al. 2025. Agrifood trade: Changing challenges, changing perspectives on policy and policy research. In Global food policy report 2025: Food policy: Lessons and priorities for a changing world, eds. Johan Swinnen and Christopher Barrett. Part Five: Effecting Change, Chapter 16, Pp. 389-412. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/174350

Keywords

Agricultural Trade; Trade; Agricultural Policies; Research; Trade Barriers; World Markets; Food Standards

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Book Chapter

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Working Paper

Systematic risk profiling: A novel approach with applications to Kenya, Rwanda, and Malawi

2024Mukashov, Askar; Robinson, Sherman; Thurlow, James; Arndt, Channing; Thomas, Timothy S.
Details

Systematic risk profiling: A novel approach with applications to Kenya, Rwanda, and Malawi

This paper uses machine learning, simulation, and data mining methods to develop Systematic Risk Profiles of three developing economies: Kenya, Rwanda, and Malawi. We focus on three exogenous shocks with implications for economic performance: world market prices, capital flows, and climate-driven sectoral productivity. In these and other developing countries, recent decades have been characterized by increased risks associated with all these factors, and there is a demand for instruments that can help to disentangle them. For each country, we utilize historical data to develop multi-variate distributions of shocks. We then sample from these distributions to obtain a series of shock vectors, which we label economic uncertainty scenarios. These scenarios are then entered into economywide computable general equilibrium (CGE) simulation models for the three countries, which allow us to quantify the impact of increased uncertainty on major economic indicators. Finally, we utilize importance metrics from the random forest machine learning algorithm and relative importance metrics from multiple linear regression models to quantify the importance of country-specific risk factors for country performance. We find that Malawi and Rwanda are more vulnerable to sectoral productivity shocks, and Kenya is more exposed to external risks. These findings suggest that a country’s level of development and integration into the global economy are key driving forces defining their risk profiles. The methodology of Systematic Risk Profiling can be applied to many other countries, delineating country-specific risks and vulnerabilities.

Year published

2024

Authors

Mukashov, Askar; Robinson, Sherman; Thurlow, James; Arndt, Channing; Thomas, Timothy S.

Citation

Mukashov, Askar; Robinson, Sherman; Thurlow, James; Arndt, Channing; and Thomas, Timothy S. 2024. Systematic risk profiling: A novel approach with applications to Kenya, Rwanda, and Malawi. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2286. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/158180

Country/Region

Kenya; Rwanda; Malawi

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Climate; Computable General Equilibrium Models; Machine Learning; Risk; Uncertainty

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Foresight

Record type

Working Paper

Resource thumbnail

Report

The International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT): Model documentation for version 3.6

2024
Robinson, Sherman; Dunston, Shahnila; Mishra, Abhijeet; Sulser, Timothy B.; Mason-D’Croz, Daniel; Robertson, Richard D.; Cenacchi, Nicola; Thomas, Timothy S.; Zhu, Tingju; Gueneau, Arthur
…more Pitois, Gauthier; Wiebe, Keith D.; Rosegrant, Mark W.
Details

The International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT): Model documentation for version 3.6

The International Food Policy Research Institute’s IMPACT model is a robust tool for analyzing global and regional challenges in food, agriculture, and natural resources. Continuously updated and refined, IMPACT version 3.6 is the latest update to the model for continuously improving the treatment of complex issues, including climate change, food security, and economic development. IMPACT 3.6 multimarket model integrates climate, crop simulation, and water models into a comprehensive system, providing decision-makers with a flexible platform to assess the potential impacts of various scenarios on biophysical systems, socioeconomic trends, technologies, and policies.

Year published

2024

Authors

Robinson, Sherman; Dunston, Shahnila; Mishra, Abhijeet; Sulser, Timothy B.; Mason-D’Croz, Daniel; Robertson, Richard D.; Cenacchi, Nicola; Thomas, Timothy S.; Zhu, Tingju; Gueneau, Arthur; Pitois, Gauthier; Wiebe, Keith D.; Rosegrant, Mark W.

Citation

Robinson, Sherman; Dunston, Shahnila; Mishra, Abhijeet; Sulser, Timothy B.; Mason-D’Croz, Daniel; Robertson, Richard D.; Cenacchi, Nicola; et al. 2024. The International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT): Model documentation for version 3.6. Modeling Systems Technical Paper 1. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/148953

Keywords

Agriculture; Commodities; Policy Analysis; Policy Innovation; Models

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

Foresight

Record type

Report

Blogs

Extraordinary COVID-19 social support programs in South Africa yield economic benefits during the pandemic period
IFPRI Blog
 | 
August 30, 2021

Extraordinary COVID-19 social support programs in South Africa yield economic benefits during the pandemic period

By Sherwin Gabriel, Dirk van Seventer, Channing Arndt, Robert J. Davies, Laurence Harris, Sherman Robinson, and Jenna Wilf

Modeling shows emergency safety net programs boost GDP during pandemic.

Assessing the toll of COVID-19 lockdown measures on the South African economy
IFPRI Blog
 | 
May 06, 2020

Assessing the toll of COVID-19 lockdown measures on the South African economy

By Channing Arndt, Sherwin Gabriel, and Sherman Robinson

Modeling shows GDP and incomes—particularly among low-income households—falling dramatically.

U.S. immigration policies may harm economies, worsen poverty in Central American countries
IFPRI Blog
 | 
November 09, 2018

U.S. immigration policies may harm economies, worsen poverty in Central American countries

By Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla, Valeria Piñeiro, and Sherman Robinson

A model shows how large-scale deportations would create problems for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

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News

October 31, 2020 | In the News

Could 5G rescue the world’s economy from a coronavirus recession? (ZDNet)

ZDNet.com posted an article on the latest argument favoring 5G–that the next generation of information and/or communications technology will support a new wave of productivity in the workplace. That wave will bring forth a new foundation for cost efficiency and commerce that benefits, directly or indirectly, everyone in the world’s broader economy. Radio and network equipment company Nokia has released a report […]

October 07, 2020 | In the News

Agriculture trade and COVID-19: trade barriers, food security and WTO reform (PIIE)

Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) presents the Trade Winds virtual event with Anabel Gonzalez, Senior Research Fellow Joseph Glauber, and Research Fellow Emeritus Sherman Robinson. The virtual event discusses the pandemic and its containment measures placed unprecedented stress on agriculture trade and raised the specter of a global food crisis. After the initial fears, how has COVID-19 affected the food system? […]

June 11, 2020 | In the News

Who has been hit hardest by South Africa’s lockdown? We found some answers (The Conversation)

The Conversation published an op-ed by EPTD Division Director Channing Arndt, Senior Research Fellow Emeritus Sherman Robinson, and Scientist Sherwin Gabriel that stated in the case of South Africa, the lockdown policies are relatively stringent, and the economic impacts large. Along with analysis and recommendations, the authors said, “With a catastrophic global pandemic coming on top of more than a […]

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