The authors study whether political campaign contributions influence agricultural protection in the United States in the manner suggested by the political economy model of Grossman and Helpman (1994). This is the first attempt to test this model using agricultural data. The authors test the...

This paper analyzes the impact of Covid-19 and uncooperative trade policies on world food markets. It quantifies the initial shock due to the pandemic under the assumption that products that are more labor intensive in production are more affected through workers' morbidity and containment...

When prices spike in international grain markets, national governments often reduce the extent to which that spike affects their domestic food markets. Those actions exacerbate the price spike and international welfare transfer associated with the terms of trade change. Several recent analyses...

How do trade reforms impact households in different parts of the income distribution? This paper presents a new database, the Household Impacts of Tariffs data set, which contains harmonized household survey and tariff data for 54 low- and lower-middle income countries. The data cover highly...

This paper measures the impact of low-cost transport by rail in Malawi on the dispersion of agricultural commodities prices across markets by exploiting the quasi-experimental design of the nearly total collapse of domestic transport by rail in January 2003 due to the destruction of a railway...

This paper is the first in a series of studies to provide background data and protection and incentive indicators for 13 major Indian crops, which have been estimated in connection with extensive research on Indian agricultural incentives. The general methodology of the studies is described in...

In 1959, shortly after the European Economic Community was founded under the 1957 Treaty of Rome, Turkey applied for Associate Membership in the then six-member common market. By 1963, a path for integrating the economies of Turkey and the eventual European Union had been mapped. As with many...

The authors create a standards restrictiveness index using newly available data on maximum residue levels of pesticides for 61 importing countries. The paper analyzes the impact that food safety standards have on international trade of agricultural products. The findings suggest that more...

This paper examines whether and how rainfall shocks affect tariff setting in the agricultural sector. In a model of strategic trade policy, the authors show that the impact of a negative rainfall shock on optimal import tariffs is generally ambiguous, depending on the weight placed by the...

This survey concludes that including agriculture in the Doha Agenda negotiations was important both economically and politically, although the political resistance to reform is particularly strong in this sector. While agriculture accounts for less than 10 percent of merchandise trade, high and...