To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa's slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices to...

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

For decades the worldÂ’s agricultural markets have been highly distorted by national government policies, but very differently for different commodities such that a ranking of weighted average nominal rates of assistance across countries can be misleading as an indicator of the trade or...

Every decade or so, food becomes newsworthy globally because of a price spike, either upwards (hurting consumers, as in 1973 and 2008) or downwards (hurting farmers in open economies, as in 1986). Most such price spikes are a consequence of major policy shifts, since local weather-induced supply...

For decades, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies, as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduce national and global economic...

While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly...

Our review of the literature suggests that the effects of GATT/WTO are insignificant or relatively small for participants in general, but potentially very large for groups that make heavy use of it. Our empirical analysis suggests that these gains are disproportionately large for the...

For decades, earnings from farming in many African countries have been depressed by own-country policies such as export restrictions on cash crop products, as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies have reduced...

A study of distortions to agricultural incentives in 18 developing countries during 1960-84, by Krueger, Schiff and Valdes (1988, 1991), found that policies in most of those developing countries were directly or indirectly harming their farmers. Since the mid-1980s there has been a substantial...

Australia‘s export-led growth in demand for commercial bottled wine was based in part on producer freedom (relative to Europeans) to blend wines across the full range of varieties and geographic regions, so as to be able to reproduce year after year a consistent style for each label. Over...