The current round of negotiations of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) represents a major initiative of economic reform. Initiatives for trade reform are far from new. A facilitative framework has been proposed that ranks policies according to their level of price...

In this paper we address a bothersome question for public choice analysis: Why do consumers and taxpayers acquiesce to seemingly inefficient wealth transfers to a relatively small number of producers? The most common and briefest answer given by political economists is that any individual...

Two important issues in the context of the provision of public goods are examined: the preference of price-distorting over nondistorting transfers, and the choice of specific output or input markets to carry the distorting taxes or subsidies. An explanation is given as to why some industries...

This paper examines the incentive of atomistic agricultural producers within a specific geographical region to differentiate and collectively market products. We develop a model that allows us to analyze the market and welfare effects of the main types of real-world producer organizations, using...

We assess the international competitiveness of the dairy industries in Argentina and Chile, combining recent market intelligence gathered from field visits with quantitative simulations of global policy reform scenarios. Both countries exhibit strong potential for export growth but face...

Models of economic systems involving government intervention by definition include some policy variables, or policy instruments, through which the policy in implemented. In general, economists have tended to view these variables as exogenously given. While convenient in dealing with some...

Throughout much of the developed world, macroeconomic policies afforded a unique period of macroeconomic stability in the two decades following World War II. As a result, concern regarding the macroeconomic linkages with food and agricultural systems largely disappeared. In the early 1970s, with...

In collective decision making, political alliances naturally arise and are critical to the negotiation processes that lead to the actual implementation of decisions. In the present context, an "alliance" refers simply to a group of political actors who share common, but not identical, interests...

The agricultural sectors of the United States and other developed countries have been subjected to a myriad of policies and regulations that have contributed to unsatisfactory production patterns and resource allocations both within and between countries. Furthermore, such policies have imposed...

This paper reports on our numerical analysis of the model developed in Rausser-Simon 1991a and 1991b. We will assume that the reader is thoroughly familiar with the latter paper and refer frequently to the terminology introduced there. Two conclusions were readily apparent from the paper. First,...