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 takes a systematic look at the portfolio choice problem faced by Investment Banks or Funds investing in transition economies. We relate the performance of projects in the transition economies to the broader macroeconomic and international environment, which affect the project through...

In the recent financial crisis, macroeconomic stimuli produced mixed results across developed economies. In contrast, China's stimulus boosted real GDP growth from an annualized 6.2% in the first quarter of 2009 trough to 11.9% in the first quarter of 2010. Amidst this phenomenal response, land...

When asked to name one proposition in the social sciences that is both true and non-trivial, Paul Samuelson famously replied: 'Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage'. Truth, however, in Samuelson's reply refers to the fact that Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage is mathematically...

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....

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...

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...

The "Masters Hypothesis" is the claim that unprecedented buying pressure from new financial index investors created a massive bubble in agricultural futures prices at various times in recent years. This paper analyzes the market impact of financial index investment in agricultural futures...