Anderson and Martin provide simple, robust rules for evaluating public spending in distorted economies. Their analysis integrates, within a clean unified framework, previous treatments of project evaluation as special cases. In this paper, the authors use a general system of fiscal accounting...

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...

Traditional weighted-average measures of trade distortions are widely used in analyzing global and regional reforms, despite well-known deficiencies. This paper develops and applies optimal aggregators for the real-world case of multiple countries and commodities with much more detailed...

Global commodity markets are affected by a variety of government policies that may expand or lower overall supply and as a result affect world prices for the specific products concerned. Market failures and market structures (market power along the value chain) also affect supply. This paper...

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. For most low-income countries, shocks that affect food prices or wage...

In 1959, shortly after the European Economic Community was founded under the 1957 Treaty of Rome, Turkey applied for Associate Membership in the then six-member common market. By 1963, a path for integrating the economies of Turkey and the eventual European Union had been mapped. As with many...

This survey concludes that including agriculture in the Doha Agenda negotiations was important both economically and politically, although the political resistance to reform is particularly strong in this sector. While agriculture accounts for less than 10 percent of merchandise trade, high and...

This paper uses resource-based cereal equivalent measures to explore the evolution of China's demand and supply for food. Although demand for food calories is probably close to its peak level in China, the ongoing dietary shift to animal-based foods, induced by income growth, is likely to impose...

Continuing rapid growth of China and India can be expected to raise incomes in Russia, but also to put adjustment pressure on Russian firms. The impacts of the rapid growth of China and India on the Russian economy are explored by examining a baseline projection using a global general...

The recent public economics literature involves an apparent consensus that income effects reduce the costs of raising revenues and hence increase the desirable level of public good provision. Higher taxes can indeed reduce the demand for leisure -- and hence increase the supply of taxed labor --...