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...

The recent period of high and volatile food prices has cast doubt on many longstanding assumptions such as the inevitability of declining real food prices, and brought to an end a long period of food price stability. Some of the key driving forces appear to have been declines in yield growth for...

The financial crisis arose in the industrial countries, but has affected developing countries through higher interest rates, sharp changes in commodity prices and reductions in investment, trade, migration and remittances. Some also see the recent food price crisis as a strongly related...

The current negotiating framework for WTO negotiations on agriculture includes flexibilities for "sensitive" products to be chosen by the importer. Without knowing which products their partners are likely to select, WTO members cannot assess the implications of an agreement for their market...

Random variation in output may lead to serious bias in cost function estimates. Despite the availability of simple, consistent instrumental variable estimators to deal with this problem, most empirical studies appear to have ignored this errors-in-variables problem, or dealt with it in an ad hoc...