Diet, Economic Development, and Climate Change

Abstract We develop a quantitative, multi-country general equilibrium framework to study the impact of economic growth, dietary restrictions, and food trade policies on global greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG) from agriculture. Motivated by new cross-country relationships between economic development, diet patterns, agricultural technologies, and GHG emissions, our framework features different income elasticities of demand across food products, and multiple agricultural technologies for production across grid cells covering the surface of the Earth, with food products and technologies being heterogeneous in their GHG emissions per calorie. Using our model’s open-economy structure, we propose a simple procedure to estimate the income elasticities without price data. We find that GHG emissions following economic growth are strongly influenced by the general equilibrium effects related to dietary changes, agricultural modernisation, and food supply readjustments. Moreover, compared to food trade policies, dietary restrictions are both substantially more effective in reducing GHG emissions, and more favourable when considering the welfare losses in developing countries.