To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa's slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices to...

We provide economy-wide modeling results of the national and regional implications of two current challenges facing the Australian wine industry: a decline in export demand for premium wines, and a possible change in the tax on domestic wine sales following the Henry Review of Taxation. The...

Australia?s wine industry has been through major structural changes over the past six decades and has grown especially rapidly since the early 1990s. Investments in generic promotion and in grape and wine research and development have been significant features of the industry throughout that...

This paper examines empirically two distinguishing aspects of the world‘s wine regions: their degree of specialization in certain varieties, as measured by a varietal intensity index; and their similarity with the varietal mix of other regions, as measured by a varietal-based regional...

Agricultural protection in rich countries, which had depressed Australian farm incomes via its impact on Australia's terms of trade, has diminished over the past two decades. So too has agricultural export taxation in poor countries, which had the opposite impact on those terms of trade....

For decades the worldÂ’s agricultural markets have been highly distorted by national government policies, but very differently for different commodities such that a ranking of weighted average nominal rates of assistance across countries can be misleading as an indicator of the trade or...

Every decade or so, food becomes newsworthy globally because of a price spike, either upwards (hurting consumers, as in 1973 and 2008) or downwards (hurting farmers in open economies, as in 1986). Most such price spikes are a consequence of major policy shifts, since local weather-induced supply...

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...

While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly...

Our review of the literature suggests that the effects of GATT/WTO are insignificant or relatively small for participants in general, but potentially very large for groups that make heavy use of it. Our empirical analysis suggests that these gains are disproportionately large for the...