There is a limited case for assisting trade-exposed emissions-intensive industries during a transitional period during which Australian resource industries but not all of their major competitors are subject to emissions constraints. There is no case for protecting Australian industry from all...

Concerned about national grain self-sufficiency and rural household incomes, in 2004 China announced that it was planning to reverse its longstanding policy of taxing farm households and instead began to provide them with subsidies. Over the past five years, annual announcements have trumpeted...

This paper examines the impact that publicly funded agricultural research has on productivity in crop production within Thailand. It tests empirically the two hypotheses that, first, publicly funded research and development (R&D) in crop production is a significant determinant of total factor...

The EU banana policy is manifestly bad. But despite a healthy policy transparency process and comprehensive public criticisms of its extreme inefficiencies, its costs have been growing progressively worse and more disruptive of international commerce. This raises serious doubts about the WTO...

The US Farm Bill of 2002 is the latest in a 7-decade history of farm subsidy laws that transfer funds to farmers and regulate and subsidize production of selected commodities. Fruit, tree nut, ornamental and vegetable crops, hay and meats remain outside scope of main subsidy programs. The new...

Recent research highlights the role that multinational trading companies may play in impeding price transmission. In markets characterised by imperfect competition, an estimate of the partial elasticity of demand may be of limited practical value if no account is taken of the reaction of...

The allocation of permits is an important design aspect of an emissions trading scheme. Traditionally, governments have favoured the free allocation of greenhouse gas permits based on individual historical emissions (‘grandfathering’) or industry benchmark data. Particularly in the European...

Over the past decades, growth in foreign direct investment (FDI) has stimulated significant attempts at developing theories that explain this trend. One line of this research explores the relationship between exchange rates and FDI. There is no consensus about the nature of this relationship in...

We examine the impact of dairy disaggregation and joint production on trade liberalisation outcomes in an economy-wide model. Depending on parameterisation, our model includes either (i) a single dairy commodity, (ii) several dairy commodities without joint production or (iii) several dairy...

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 has had the opposite impact on those terms of trade....