The potential welfare gains from further liberalizing agricultural markets are huge, both absolutely and relative to gains from liberalizing textiles or other manufacturing, according to recent GTAP modelling results. Should attempts to liberalize farm trade in the next WTO round follow the same...

An analytical framework for dealing with political entrepreneurship and reform is proposed which is based on some new combinations of Schumpeterian political economy, an extended version of Tullock's model of democracy as franchise-bidding for natural monopoly and some basic elements of New...

We are in the midst of a series of economic crises that have altered the economic and socio- political fortunes of several heretofore rapidly developing states. At a second, more abstract though no less significant level, the East Asian economic crises and the global contagion that has emanated...

The impact of trade reforms on economic performance in ten Latin American countries is examined using a panel data set of 17 annual observations. Each country is classified as 'reformed' or 'unreformed' in a given year, and the model tests whether reform improves performance across various...

When shock therapy is politically infeasible, will gradualism work? Mussa (1986) conjectured, in the context of a neoclassical model of adjustment, that the answer was ‘yes’. This paper takes up the Mussa conjecture by: (i) building a political-economy model in which it makes sense; (ii)...

This paper investigates the efficiency of adjustment to economic reform programs when the cost of adjustment arises from high unemployment that can be generated as contracting sectors shrink faster than expanding sectors grow. Under plausible assumptions on the adjustment process, the speed of...