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...

The volatility of food prices has always concerned national governments, especially those of open developing economies, as it undermines their perceived national food security. A common policy approach has been to partially insulate their domestic market from international food price...

For decades, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduce national and global economic...

The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This article reviews and synthesizes...

For individual countries, variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices. If this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market, its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility. This study shows the nature of the...

For decades, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduce national and global economic...

To analyze the effects of prospective policy changes, sectoral and economy-wide modelers need to begin with baseline estimates of policy induced price distortions. Global trade modelers mostly use the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) protection database, which currently relies heavily on...

Agricultural markets in OECD countries have long been highly distorted by government policies. Traditional weighted average aggregates of the price distortions involved, such as producer and consumer support estimates (PSEs and CSEs), can be poor indicators of the trade restrictiveness and...

Most-favoured-nation (MFN) trade liberalizations will always improve global economic welfare provided globally optimal environmental, and other, policies are in place. But since the latter proviso is not met in practice, empirical studies of the environmental and resource depletion effects of...

This paper addresses several questions of concern to economies excluded from the world's two major trading blocs <196> the European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA). First, is there evidence from the past that suggests the direct and indirect effects of regional...</196>