About

Anubhab Gupta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on the intersection of international development and agricultural policies in both developed and developing country settings. He applies economic theory and applied econometric tools to understand issues in agricultural markets, impact evaluations of development projects, and the structure of agricultural supply chains in rural settings. His work emphasizes developing tools for impact evaluations of programs and policies, with particular attention to local-economy general equilibrium impacts, market structures, market power, and supply chains. Gupta's secondary research topics include conflicts- and climate-change-induced population displacement, refugee economics, livelihood diversification, and coping strategies for vulnerable households facing climate change. He collaborates regularly with international organizations such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, and the World Food Programme. His educational background includes a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Davis, an M.S. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Arizona, an M.S. in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and a B.S. in Economics from the University of Calcutta in India. He has taught courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels and has received several awards for his research and teaching.

Research topics

• Business
• Economics
• Geography
• Natural resource economics
• Agricultural economics
• Demographic economics
• Economic growth
• Finance
• Ecology
• Development economics
• Socioeconomics
• Medicine
• Virology

Selected publications

• Long-term Impacts of a Poverty Program: A Local-economy Cost-benefit Analysis of Lesotho’s Child Grants Program

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Rural Economy-wide Impacts of Kenya’s Home-Grown School Meals Program

  Food Policy · 2025-05-19 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Economic costs of extreme heat on groundnut production in the Senegal Groundnut Basin

  Food Policy · 2025-10-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Impacts of Financial Literacy Training on Refugee Youth Outcomes

  The Journal of Development Studies · 2025-04-14

  articleCorresponding

  As humanitarian assistance from international organizations transitions from in-kind- to cash- aid, and increasingly through digital payments, the importance of digital financial literacy to complement cash transfer programs has grown significantly. This paper evaluates the impact of a financial literacy training program on refugee youth outcomes in Uganda. We adopt an approach that closely emulates a natural experiment by leveraging the staggered geographic rollout of the program to identify its impacts. Using reduced-form econometric analyses, robust to various specifications, we find that participation in the training program is associated with significant positive effects on financial knowledge and financial behavior among young refugees. The findings are important because financial knowledge is essential for saving decisions, responsible borrowing, business operations, and various other life goals among refugees. Our results also suggest that the training program boosted youth’s confidence in terms of integrating with the host population.

  PublisherDOI

• Impacts of Financial Literacy Training on Refugee Youth Outcomes

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Economic impact of giving land to refugees

  American Journal of Agricultural Economics · 2023-01-19 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract This paper adds to a sparse but growing literature on the economic costs and benefits of hosting refugees, including a unique policy of providing refugees with access to cultivable land. We construct a general equilibrium model from microsurvey data to simulate the spillover effects of giving land to refugees on income and production in the host‐country economy surrounding a refugee settlement in Uganda. Reduced‐form econometric analysis of land allocations at the refugee settlement, robust to several specifications, confirms the simulation finding that providing refugees with agricultural land significantly improves their welfare and self‐reliance. Simulations reveal that refugee aid and land allocations generate positive income spillovers in the local economy out to a 15‐km radius around the refugee settlement. Host‐country households benefit significantly from the income spillovers that refugee assistance creates, and host‐country agriculture is the largest beneficiary among production sectors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Economic impact of nature-based tourism

  PLoS ONE · 2023 · 47 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Natural resource economics
  • Economics
  • Business

  Protected areas (PAs) can help address biodiversity loss by promoting conservation while fostering economic development through sustainable tourism. Nature-based tourism can generate economic benefits for communities in and around PAs; however, its impacts do not lend themselves to conventional impact evaluation tools. We utilize a Monte Carlo simulation approach with econometric estimations using microdata to estimate the full economic impact of nature-based tourism on the economies surrounding three terrestrial and two marine PAs. Simulations suggest that nature-based tourism creates significant economic benefits for communities around PAs, including the poorest households, and many of these benefits are indirect, via income and production spillovers. An additional tourist increases annual real income in communities near the PAs by US$169-$2,400, significantly more than the average tourist's expenditure. Conversely, lost tourism due to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic costs of human-wildlife conflict have disproportionately large negative impacts on local incomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Assessing the economic impact of protected area tourism on local economies in Brazil

  LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · 2021-01-01

  reportOpen access

  The objective of this study is to make the economic case for public investment in protected areas by estimating tourism’s direct and indirect benefits to local economies around protected areas in Brazil. The study site is the Abrolhos Marine National Park, which was established in 1983, covers over 91,000 hectares, and is roughly 67 kilometers off the southern coast of Bahia State, with its populated coastline, the Costa das Baleias (or Whale Coast). The region hosts major townships south of and including the city of Prado, namely Alcobaça, Caravelas and Teixeira de Freitas. The Park includes the five volcanic islands in the Abrolhos Archipelago, the largest whale nursery in the South Atlantic Ocean. The study affirms that investment in protected areas pays off, and is good for biodiversity conservation and the development of the local economy. The study found that the economic return per Real of government spending in protected areas is significantly greater than 1: economic returns of 6.2 Reais per Real of government spending are estimated for Abrolhos Marine National Park. Findings also show that spending by tourists visiting Abrolhos Marine National Park and the Whale Coast generates significant income multipliers for households in the local economy.

  Publisher

• Implications of farm size and staple production on rural and urban dietary diversity

  AgEcon Search (University of Minnesota, USA) · 2021-01-01

  preprintOpen access

  International Development, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Production Economics

  PublisherDOI

• A local general‐equilibrium emergency response modeling approach for sub‐Saharan Africa

  Agricultural Economics · 2021-12-05 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Swift response models are vital tools for emergency assistance agencies. The COVID‐19 pandemic revealed the lack of economic models for short‐run policy relevant research to anticipate local impacts and design effective policy responses. The most direct effects of the pandemic and lockdown tended to be concentrated in urban areas; however, markets quickly transmitted impacts to rural areas as well as among poor and non‐poor households. General equilibrium modeling is a tool of choice to capture indirect, spillover effects of exogenous shocks. This article describes an unusual micro general‐equilibrium (GE) modeling approach that we developed to quickly simulate impacts of the pandemic and lockdowns on poor and non‐poor rural and urban households across sub‐Saharan Africa. Monte Carlo bootstrapping was used to construct four stylized regional GE models from 34 existing local economy‐wide impact evaluation (LEWIE) models. Simulations revealed that the pandemic and policy responses to curtail its spread were likely to affect rural households at least as severely as urban households. Simulated income losses are greater in poor households in both urban and rural settings. These findings are relatively consistent across models spanning sub‐Saharan Africa. Because COVID‐19 impacts are so far‐reaching, all types of economies experience downturns. Our research underlines the importance of modeling assumptions. We find total annualized impacts of around a 6‐percent loss of GDP, smaller than estimates from single‐country models that ignore price effects, such as SAM‐multiplier models, but in line with The World Bank's baseline forecast of a 5.2% contraction in global GDP in 2020. The largest negative impacts are on poor rural households.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Heng Zhu

  World Food Programme

  6 shared

• J. Edward Taylor

  5 shared

• Mateusz Filipski

  University of Georgia

  5 shared

• J. Edward Taylor

  5 shared

• Binoy Majumder

  4 shared

• Justin Kagin

  3 shared

• Aditi Mukherji

  3 shared

• J.V. Meenakshi

  University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore

  3 shared

Labs

• Department of Agricultural and Applied EconomicsPI

Awards & honors

• CALS Global Opportunity Initiative (GOI) Fellow, Virginia Te…
• Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award, UC Davis (2018)
• Erika C.H. Meng Scholarship for Development Policy and Resea…
• Blum Center PASS Research Grant, UC Davis (2018-19)
• UC Davis and Humanities Graduate Research Award (2018-19)