This paper investigates the empirical foundation for policy reform prescriptions suggested by the institutional approach to economic growth. The focus is the relationship between institutional reforms, measured by changes in a country's political or civil rights, and economic growth. Empirical...

Models of economic systems involving government intervention by definition include some policy variables, or policy instruments, through which the policy in implemented. In general, economists have tended to view these variables as exogenously given. While convenient in dealing with some...

The current round of negotiations of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) represents a major initiative of economic reform. Initiatives for trade reform are far from new. A facilitative framework has been proposed that ranks policies according to their level of price...

Throughout much of the developed world, macroeconomic policies afforded a unique period of macroeconomic stability in the two decades following World War II. As a result, concern regarding the macroeconomic linkages with food and agricultural systems largely disappeared. In the early 1970s, with...

In collective decision making, political alliances naturally arise and are critical to the negotiation processes that lead to the actual implementation of decisions. In the present context, an "alliance" refers simply to a group of political actors who share common, but not identical, interests...

The agricultural sectors of the United States and other developed countries have been subjected to a myriad of policies and regulations that have contributed to unsatisfactory production patterns and resource allocations both within and between countries. Furthermore, such policies have imposed...

This paper reports on our numerical analysis of the model developed in Rausser-Simon 1991a and 1991b. We will assume that the reader is thoroughly familiar with the latter paper and refer frequently to the terminology introduced there. Two conclusions were readily apparent from the paper. First,...

Collective action, although often superior to anarchy, tends to be socially suboptimal even when the proclivity of free riders to defect is fully controlled and an organization for collective action is set up. An effective organization for collective action involving many participants will...

The domestic support of and protectionist policies toward agriculture in major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries has been partly responsible for surplus commodity production and sagging international commodity prices in recent years. Between 1980 and 1987,...

In the second of three related papers, the authors develop a model that estimates the effects on prices, outputs, and trade flows arising from the elimination of U.S. import tariffs on contemplate agricultural commodities from Latin America. Eight agricultural commodities and six countries were...