This text provides guidance to policymakers on how to design and implement sound price-subsidy reforms. It draws on the experience of price-subsidy reform in 28 countries. The authors discuss economic and political considerations and make several recommendations concerning the speed of reform...

"Efforts to strengthen the global patent system for pharmaceuticals continue to be controversial, and what will likely be a similarly fraught international debate over price controls has begun. The outcome of international negotiations and the resulting policy decisions made by each country will...

This paper reviews the adjustments of the feed-in tariff for new solar photovoltaics (PV) installations in Germany. As PV system prices declined rapidly over the last years, the German government implemented automatic mechanisms to adjust the support level for new installations in response to...

This paper considers genetically modified (GM) seed adoption decisions by farmers in a developing country under two alternative information regimes (with and without perfect information regarding production conditions) that allows the monopolist producer of GM seeds to either practice perfect...

This paper has two purposes. It first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes -- reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints -- were meant to partially insulate...

Unable to cope fully with steadily climbing world oil prices since mid-2009, many of the 65 countries reviewed in this paper have progressed slowly or even reversed course in reforming pricing of petroleum products. End-user prices in July 2012 varied by two orders of magnitude across the...

When food prices spike in countries with large numbers of poor people, public intervention is essential to alleviate hunger and malnutrition. For governments, this is also a case of political survival. Government actions often take the form of direct interventions in the market to stabilize food...

This paper first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes--reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints--were meant to partially insulate domestic markets from the...