"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...

"Anderson, Damania, and Jackson develop a common-agency lobbying model to help understand why North America and the European Union have adopted such different policies toward genetically modified (GM) food. Their results show that when firms (in this case farmers) lobby policymakers to influence...