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...

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...

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...

Any attempt to reform existing public policies or to implement new policies faces an arduous negotiation process and the tyranny of the status quo. One of the basic premises of the Uruguay Round of the GATT is that the reform of border policies could not be sustained without dramatic...

In the case of the U.S. agricultural policy, this paper shows how governmental intervention can be formally incorporated in a conditional-vector-error-correcting model. From the resulting theoretical framework and empirical analysis, formal hypotheses are tested regarding both forward and...

United States dairy policy includes both predatory and productive components. The milk price support program is designed to transfer income to dairy farmers while research and extension expenditures are designed to increase social welfare. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an empirical...

In a companion series of papers, we have described a new bargaining institution and the design of laboratory experiments to assess its performance (see Rausser and Simon [1991] and Harrison and Simon [1991]). In this paper we describe and evaluate the first series of pilot experiments. In...

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...