The existence of linkages between the agricultural sector and the rest of the economy points to the specificity of that sector and justifies why we can conceive of a macroeconomics of agriculture. The primary sector is characterized by product homogeneity, a pre-condition for the absence of...

Rural development policy addresses the welfare of rural households and communities. With a majority of the world's poor located in rural areas, the resilience of rural poverty in industrialized countries, and a significant share of environmental degradation the byproduct of rural poverty, the...

The major food projection agencies see per capita food supplies continuing to increase and real prices of foodstuffs continuing to decline. This trend in food prices has made, and will continue to make, achievement of food security possible for a greater proportion of the world's population....

In the conventional theory of common-pool resources, participants do not undertake efforts to design their own governance arrangements. Substantial empirical evidence exists, however, that many common-pool resources are self-governed. Thus, in this chapter, I briefly review the conventional...

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...