We evaluate the importance of the competitiveness and productive efficiency of the food processing sector for predicting policy outcomes, and the sector's performance under selected government interventions. Our model is based on firm-level decisions and focuses explicitly on the effects of...

Models of economic systems involving government intervention by definition include some policy variables, or policy instruments, through which the policy in implemented. In general, economists have tended to view these variables as exogenously given. While convenient in dealing with some...

Any attempt to reform existing public policies or to implement new policies faces an arduous negotiation process and the tyranny of the status quo. One of the basic premises of the Uruguay Round of the GATT is that the reform of border policies could not be sustained without dramatic...

In the case of the U.S. agricultural policy, this paper shows how governmental intervention can be formally incorporated in a conditional-vector-error-correcting model. From the resulting theoretical framework and empirical analysis, formal hypotheses are tested regarding both forward and...

United States dairy policy includes both predatory and productive components. The milk price support program is designed to transfer income to dairy farmers while research and extension expenditures are designed to increase social welfare. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an empirical...

In a companion series of papers, we have described a new bargaining institution and the design of laboratory experiments to assess its performance (see Rausser and Simon [1991] and Harrison and Simon [1991]). In this paper we describe and evaluate the first series of pilot experiments. In...

Throughout much of the developed world, macroeconomic policies afforded a unique period of macroeconomic stability in the two decades following World War II. As a result, concern regarding the macroeconomic linkages with food and agricultural systems largely disappeared. In the early 1970s, with...

In collective decision making, political alliances naturally arise and are critical to the negotiation processes that lead to the actual implementation of decisions. In the present context, an "alliance" refers simply to a group of political actors who share common, but not identical, interests...