This paper has two purposes. It first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes -- reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints -- were meant to partially insulate...

For individual countries, variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices. If this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market, its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility. This study shows the nature of the...

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but...

The claim by global trade modelers that the potential contribution to global economic welfare of removing agricultural subsidies is less than one-tenth of that from removing agricultural tariffs puzzles many observers. To help explain that result, the authors first compare the OECD and...

This paper provides new estimates of the global gains from multilateral trade reform and their distribution among developing countries in the presence of trade preferences. Particular attention is given to agriculture, as farmers constitute the poorest households in developing countries but are...

In the event of large swings in world food prices, countries often intervene to dampen the impact of international food price spikes on domestic prices and to lessen the burden of adjustment on vulnerable population groups. While individual countries can succeed at insulating their domestic...

This paper explores the economic implications of a potential free trade agreement between India and the United States. A series of simulations is conducted assuming 100 percent ad valorem equivalent tariff cuts for goods and 50 percent cuts for services. The overall impacts are likely to be...

In projecting global food demand to 2050, much attention has been given to rising demand due to the projected population increase from the current 7.4 billion to more than 9 billion. An increasingly important source of the increase in food demand is per capita demand growth induced by rising...

Recent work on China's accession to the World Trade Organizations pays little attention to the wave of reforms in China in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms created the preconditions for accession and strongly influenced its outcomes. The preeminence of processing trade at the time of accession...

India has pursued an active food security policy for many years, using a combination of trade policy interventions, public distribution of food staples, and assistance to farmers through minimum support prices defended by public stocks. This policy has been quite successful in stabilizing staple...