Nearly all countries tax the domestic consumption of alcoholic beverages. However, the rates of taxation, and the tax instruments used, vary enormously between countries. This paper provides estimates, for a wide range of high-income and developing countries, of the consumer tax equivalents...

Twenty five years ago, the Southern Hemisphere contributed 12 percent of the worldÂ’s wine production and North America added another 5 percent. Together those countries accounted for less than 2 percent of global exports. By 2009, however, the New World accounted for 26 percent of global...

As part of a comprehensive review of AustraliaÂ’s tax system, the taxes on alcoholic beverages recently came under scrutiny. In its initial response to the review in May 2010, the government chose to not change those taxes, even though the review recommended the wine tax switch from an ad...

Despite recent reforms, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of those price distortions can be poor guides to the policies? economic effects. Recent theoretical literature provides indicators of trade and welfare-reducing effects of...

A study of distortions to agricultural incentives in 18 developing countries during 1960-84, by Krueger, Schiff and Valdes (1988, 1991), found that policies in most of those developing countries were directly or indirectly harming their farmers. Since the mid-1980s there has been a substantial...

Australia‘s export-led growth in demand for commercial bottled wine was based in part on producer freedom (relative to Europeans) to blend wines across the full range of varieties and geographic regions, so as to be able to reproduce year after year a consistent style for each label. Over...

For decades, earnings from farming in Latin American countries have been depressed by pro-urban and anti-trade biases in own-country policies and by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. These policies have reduced national and global economic...