This chapter presents the theory of consumer choice as applied to household behavior. An internally consistent, self-contained framework is developed for the analysis of consumer preferences, household production, quality attributes, and produced nonmarket commodities in static and dynamic...

Government intervention in agricultural sectors in both developed and developing countries has resulted in huge distortions in international markets. We describe the types of policies used in the agricultural sector and summarize quantitative measures that suggest their importance. Agricultural...

Widespread hunger and malnutrition persist today despite considerable growth in per capita food availability. This has prompted an evolving conceptualization of food security and of mechanisms to attain and maintain food security. This chapter discusses both food security and food assistance...

The distinctive nature of environmental quality problems in agriculture -- an industry based on the extraction of highly variable natural resources under stochastic conditions -- has important implications for policy design. First, we examine the source of environmental quality problems and the...

This chapter focuses upon competitive relationships in agricultural markets. These markets often exhibit high and increasing levels of buyer and/or seller concentration. Both food manufacturing and retailing are characterized by aggressive attempts by firms to achieve product differentiation....

This chapter is concerned with agricultural supply responses in developing countries. Its main emphasis is in explicitly considering the dynamics of the natural resource base (e.g., soil quality, water, etc.) of agriculture as well as the endogenous evolution of rural environmental institutions...

A broad range of agriculture-environment interactions can be organized around the concept of agriculture as a producer and consumer of ecosystem services. Viewed as capital assets, ecosystems embody production technologies that are valuable, complex, and often poorly understood. The quantity and...

Agricultural commodities are typically produced over an extensive spatial area and are costly to transport relative to their total value. These characteristics yield a complex set of spatial price linkages which are often studied to gain insights into the performance of markets. An extensive...

This chapter first discusses what economists mean by "the incidence of agricultural policy" and why we care about it. Then it reviews models of the determinants of the differential incidence of different policies among interest groups such as suppliers of factors of production, consumers,...

Based on an economy-wide perspective, this paper begins with a discussion of the bias against exports and agriculture that characterized the economic literature and the development strategies in many developing countries after World War II. This is followed by an analysis of how the...