This issue of the Zambia Social Science Journal looks at a number of pressing issues focusing on different parts of the Southern African sub-region. In Estimating the Impact of Food, Fuel, and Financial Crises on Zambian Households, Neil McCulloch and Amit Grover combine national household survey data from Zambia in 2006 with detailed, spatially disaggregated price data, to simulate the likely welfare impacts of the price changes arising from the food, fuel, and financial crises between 2006 and 2009. Their findings indicate that, while households overall react negatively to price rises, agricultural households benefit from rises in food prices. Moving to Mozambique, Per-Ake Andersson and Bo Sjo, in Successful Inflation Targeting in Mozambique Despite Vulnerability to Internal and External Shocks, explain why and how Mozambique has succeeded in controlling inflation so that it has achieved higher levels of economic growth. Their results indicate that Mozambique's success is based on its use of a crawling peg exchange rate regime. Looking at Southern Africa more generally speaking, Gelson Tembo, in his article "Food Aid, Trade, and Food Security in Southern Africa," investigates the impact of food aid and commercial imports on cereal surplus production in the region, using a panel vector autoregressive (VAR) model and 23-year data (1980-2003) on 8 SADC countries. Tembo's results indicate that food aid does not have significant production disincentive effects, but that rather production is influenced by a myriad of external factors, both policy and environmentally stimulated.
About the Author: Jotham C Momba is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political and Administrative Studies at the University of Zambia and has also taught at the University of Swaziland and at Drew University as Fulbright Scholar. Dr. Momba received his BA degree from the University of Zambia and his MA and PhD degrees from the University of Toronto. His area of specialisation is comparative politics. He has previously served as President of the Organisation for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA) from 2007- 2011; as a Member of the Board of Directors, Zambia Open University, from 2007-2008; and as Editorial Advisory Board Member, Afro-Eurasian Studies, since 2012.