Equity and efficiency justifications are found for the Community’s Structural Funds which are discovered to be carefully targeted at depressed regions, albeit with some horizontal inequities. If Fund transfers displace national assistance, then they may be misallocated by being tied to...

France is the top agricultural producer in the European Union (EU), and agriculture plays a prominent role in the country's foreign trade and intermediate exchanges. Reflecting production volumes and methods, the sector, however, also generates significant negative environmental and public...

This paper examines the recent difficulties experienced in U.S. agriculture, and discusses the role played by government policies, in particular reviewing recent developments in those policies. Studies of the extent and costs of agricultural protection in the United States and other major...

This paper aims to illustrate the important fiscal aspects of an agricultural price stabilization fund by examining the operations and experience of the CSSPPA in Côte d’Ivoire. After considering some of the issues that determine whether a price stabilization fund should be in the private or...

This paper analyses the economic costs of current agricultural policies in Turkmenistan. It argues that the opportunity cost of continuing with these policies is very high for the budget, the average farmer, and the economy as a whole. The paper calls for the development of nontraditional...

Populists claim to be the only legitimate representative of the people. Does it mean that there is no space for civil society? The issue is important because since Tocqueville (1835), associations and civil society have been recognized as a key factor in a healthy liberal democracy. We ask two...

In this paper I apply firm-level analysis to examine how the Brexit process has affected business investment in the UK. An interaction term of potential trade costs after exiting the EU and a measure of firms' participation in global trade is used as a proxy for firm-level exposure to...

Most short-term interest rates in the Euro area are below the European Central Bank deposit facility rate, the rate at which the central bank remunerates banks' excess reserves. This unexpected development coincided with the start of the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP). In this paper, we...

We analyze the impact of trade policy uncertainty on investment in the euro area. Our identification strategy assumes that countries that are relatively more dependent on global trade networks exhibit a higher sensitivity of investment with respect to trade uncertainty. We find that the...

Adoption of inflation targeting by the Bank of Korea (BOK) in 1998 contributed to low and stable inflation. However, after the global financial crisis (GFC) monetary policy faced more challenging conditions. Inflation slipped below the target range in 2012 and remains below it despite a cut in...