The recent acceleration of regional and global integration of national economies has brought with it greater scrutiny of domestic policies that affect the competitiveness of industries in the international marketplace. Simultaneously, concerns about resource depletion and environmental...

The development of genetically modified (GM) agricultural products requires new policies to manage potential food safety and environmental risks. The policy positions taken to date on GM foods by the United States and the European Union are very different. The US has few restrictions on...

A decline in governmental distortions to agricultural and other trade since the 1980s hascontributed to economic growth and poverty alleviation globally. But new modeling resultssuggest that has taken the world only three-fifths of the way towards freeing merchandisetrade, and that farm policies...

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 favouring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduced global economic welfare and...

The global database developed as an integral part of the World Bank's research project on Distortions to Agricultural Incentives, which is publicly available at www.worldbank.org/agdistortions, provides around 30,000 estimates of nominal rates of assistance to agricultural industries (NRAs) and...

This paper summarizes a new database that sheds light on the impact of trade-related policy developments over the past half century on distortions to agricultural incentives and thus also to consumer prices for food in 75 countries spanning the per capita income spectrum. Price-support policies...