The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This article reviews and synthesizes...

This book brings together core papers by the author and some of his colleagues during the past two decades on the role of trade openness, especially in farm products, in promotion national and global economic development. The chapters cover four areas: how national comparative advantage evolves...

This paper provides estimates of the impact that removing all merchandise trade distortions (including agricultural subsidies) would have on food and agricultural production, trade and incomes. Using the latest versions of the GTAP database and the World Bank's LINKAGE model of the global...

To analyze the effects of prospective policy changes, sectoral and economy-wide modelers need to begin with baseline estimates of policy induced price distortions. Global trade modelers mostly use the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) protection database, which currently relies heavily on...

The second decade of rapid globalization of the wine industry is assessed using a newly-published statistical compendium of global wine markets. A dozen observations are made from those data offer insights into key new opportunities and challenges associated with recent globalization forces. A...

Recent globalisation has been characterised by a decline in costs of cross-border trade in farm and other products. It has been driven primarily by the information and communication technology revolution and – in the case of farm products – by reductions in governmental distortions to...

This paper offers an economic assessment of the opportunities and challenges provided by the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda, particularly through agricultural trade liberalization, for low-income countries seeking to trade their way out of poverty. After discussing links between poverty,...

Rapid trade-led economic growth in emerging Asia has been shifting the global economic and industrial centres of gravity away from the north Atlantic, raising the importance of Asia in world trade but also altering the commodity composition of trade by Asia and other regions. What began with...

Developing Asia's rapid economic growth has been shifting the global economic and industrial centers of gravity away from the North Atlantic, raising the importance of Asia in world trade, and boosting South–South trade. How will trade patterns change over the next 2 decades in the course of...