Any attempt to reform existing public policies or to implement new policies faces an arduous negotiation process and the tyranny of the status quo. One of the basic premises of the Uruguay Round of the GATT is that the reform of border policies could not be sustained without dramatic...

In the case of the U.S. agricultural policy, this paper shows how governmental intervention can be formally incorporated in a conditional-vector-error-correcting model. From the resulting theoretical framework and empirical analysis, formal hypotheses are tested regarding both forward and...

United States dairy policy includes both predatory and productive components. The milk price support program is designed to transfer income to dairy farmers while research and extension expenditures are designed to increase social welfare. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an empirical...

In a companion series of papers, we have described a new bargaining institution and the design of laboratory experiments to assess its performance (see Rausser and Simon [1991] and Harrison and Simon [1991]). In this paper we describe and evaluate the first series of pilot experiments. In...

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...

There is a broad consensus among economists, policymakers, and informed citizens that free-market economics do not preclude many inefficiencies in resource allocation. There are many circumstances where policy interventions have the potential to achieve a "Pareto improvement" in the sense of...

This paper proposes a noncooperative model of multilateral bargaining. The model can be viewed as an extension of the famous Stahl-Rubinstein bargaining game. Two players take turns proposing a division of a "pie." After one player has proposed a division, the other can accept or reject the...

In the first of three related papers, the authors analyze the dynamic pattern of comparative advantage in fruit and vegetable trade flows between the United States and Latin America. Their examination of several factors--including market demand, improving investment climates, technological...

Two important issues in the context of the provision of public goods are examined: the preference of price-distorting over nondistorting transfers, and the choice of specific output or input markets to carry the distorting taxes or subsidies. An explanation is given as to why some industries...

Available evidence taken from the experience of many countries strongly suggests that bad governments and institutions have been serious, if not the most serious, obstacle to economic growth; and all public sectors pursue a mix of both predatory and productive activities—bad governments...