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

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...

Tariffs on agricultural products fell sharply in China both prior to, and as a consequence of, China's accession to the WTO. The paper examines the nature of agricultural trade reform in China since 1981, and finds that protection was quite strongly negative for most commodities, and...

This paper evaluates the influence of diverse U.S. agricultural interest groups on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Under NAFTA, licenses and quotas that restricted agricultural trade between Mexico and the United States were converted to tariffs in January 1994 and all tariffs...

Liberalization of tropical agricultural markets has brought globalization, in the sense that all producers now face world rather than domestic prices. Producer prices have tended to rise as a share of fob prices as intermediation costs and tax has declined. However, in conjunction with inelastic...

In early 2003, France actively tried to thwart the plans of the Bush administration to build international support for a war to depose Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein. In response, calls in the United States for a boycott of French products, wine in particular, rebounded through all forms of media....

We build into a Ricardian model sectoral linkages, trade in intermediate goods, and sectoral heterogeneity in production to quantify the trade and welfare effects from tariff changes. We also propose a new method to estimate sectoral trade elasticities consistent with any trade model that...

Global value chains (GVCs) allow firms to produce and export final goods, or to perform only intermediate stages of production by processing imported inputs for re-exporting. We examine how financial constraints determine companies' position in GVCs and how this position affects profitability....

We assess the impact of U.S. trade policy uncertainty (TPU) toward China in a tractable general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous firms. We show that increased TPU reduces investment in export entry and technology upgrading, which in turn reduces trade flows and real income for consumers....

We investigate the extent to which antidumping actions eliminate trade altogether. Using quarterly export data for products involved in U.S. antidumping cases we find that antidumping actions increase the hazard rate by more than fifty percent. We find strong evidence of investigation effects...