Raymond Morgan

Canada's remote northern communities have some of the highest food prices and food insecurity rates in the world and rely on a small number of retail and transportation firms. In 2017, the largest retailer in the region, the North West Company, acquired a regional airline and started transporting its own air freight to some of the "fly-in" communities it serves. Using a difference-in-difference design, we evaluate the effects of vertical integration on prices and shipment quantities of perishable foods. We find that after the acquisition, communities with vertically integrated retail-air freight experienced 3.8% lower prices and 11.9% higher shipment quantities relative to comparison communities. Effects are qualitatively similar in communities where the acquisition changed firm boundaries without changing routes or upstream competition (Ontario) versus communities where it created new routes and competition (Manitoba and Nunavut). In communities where the retailer has a larger market share, its price falls by less but total community-level shipments rise by more. A theoretical model suggests that this could be due to greater "business-stealing" and lower share of sales exposed to marginal cost reductions in more competitive communities, and evidence from retailer-level shipments supports this interpretation. Our findings show that vertical integration can benefit consumers in markets with limited competition but that the size and nature of these benefits is sensitive to upstream and downstream market structure.

Remoteness, defined broadly as the distance of a location from other salient locations, is associated with many negative economic outcomes. The high costs of remoteness can also affect government budgeting and motivate mitigation policies. We explore measurement of remoteness in a Canadian context and its association with economic outcomes, with a focus on food security and food prices. We find that the impact of extreme remoteness on prices and costs – for example, the case of fly-in communities with no regular road connection – is not well captured by the widely-used Statistics Canada remoteness index. But we also find that some road-connected communities have higher prices than fly-in communities, raising questions about the criteria used to determine eligibility for Nutrition North Canada, a freight subsidy that mitigates the effect of extreme remoteness on food costs. Our analysis highlights how both the measurement of remoteness and the targeting of policies to mitigate the costs of remoteness would benefit from paying closer attention to supply-chains and by leveraging additional public data on prices and freight costs.

How does foreign investment shape violence in fragile states? I study this question in Myanmar, where foreign capital expanded during a decade marked by political transition, armed conflict, and the 2021 military coup. I combine a township-year panel for 2015–2024 with sectoral foreign direct investment (FDI) approvals and pre-period employment shares to construct local shift-share measures of exposure to national FDI movements. I distinguish resource from non-resource investment and disaggregate conflict fatalities by the identities of perpetrators and victims. The aggregate relationship between FDI exposure and conflict is weak, but this masks pronounced sectoral differences. Greater resource-sector exposure is associated with less state–nonstate battlefield violence but more violence by non-state actors against civilians. By contrast, greater non-resource exposure is associated with lower fatalities overall, with the largest reductions in nonstate violence against civilians. These findings suggest that the consequences of foreign investment for conflict depend not simply on how much investment arrives, but on the sectors it enters and the forms of violence it reshapes.

In this report, we document the state of food insecurity and the impact of ICFI-funded food supports for families in Nunavut. Existing research demonstrates that nearly 8 out of 10 Inuit children were food insecure before the start of the HFV, that food insecurity is linked to serious physical and psychological harm and that food insecurity in Nunavut is driven by deep structural inequities. Our research shows that Inuit families are drawing on their individual and collective strengths, and a sophisticated range of budget-stretching strategies, to try to ensure access to food, with dignity, for everyone in the community.

The aim of this report is to provide the most comprehensive analysis of food prices in Nunavut to date. We analyzed multiple sources of Nunavut food price data to provide a comprehensive assessment of current price levels (i.e. how the price of a product or basket of products compares to Canadian averages) and recent inflation (i.e. how much prices have increased in Nunavut compared to increases in Canadian average prices). We draw on receipts from families receiving individual grocery supports through the Inuit Child First Initiative (ICFI) that were digitized, shared with us by Indigenous Services Canada as well as publicly available data sources – the Nunavut Price Survey, published RNFB food basket costs from Nutrition North Canada, scraped prices from retailer websites, and other data sets published by Statistics Canada and the Federal Government – to analyze price inflation and price levels compared to the rest of Canada.

In this report, we present preliminary findings from a multidisciplinary, mixed methods study that started as an evaluation of individual requests for grocery supports in Qikiqtaaluk and evolved as the Hamlet Food Voucher programs came into place and were then discontinued. We draw on key informant interviews with 21 people living/working in seven hamlets or working at the regional level (Qikiqtaaluk or Nunavut). we draw on existing literature to briefly describe food insecurity in the Qikiqtaaluk region of Nunavut as a long-term, systemic problem. It is grounded in colonialism and compounded by a gap between the support available through government benefits (like income assistance and child benefits) and the cost of living in Nunavut.