Consumption baskets vary across households and inflation rates vary across goods. As a result, standard consumer price index (CPI) inflation may provide a misleading measure of the inflation actually faced by poor households, more so the more unequal the distribution of aggregate consumption...

The three goals of recent agricultural pricing policies in Mexico for maize have been to raise farm income and crop profitability by boosting domestic prices through trade restrictions, to provide some price certainty at planting time, and to reduce year-to-year variations in maize prices. The...

This paper first describes those features of the electricity supply industry that make a prospective market monitoring process essential to a well-functioning wholesale market. Some of these features are shared with the securities industry, although the technology of electricity production and...

The exploitation of the Soviet Union's foreign trade potential would necessitate adopting a realistic exchange rate and increasing the foreign exchange retention quotas for direct and indirect exporters. It would also require reforms of domestic policies. The first prerequisite is the...

Historically, Eastern Europe has not been favorably treated in terms of quota growth in the European Community and U.S. markets - often quite the contrary. But the EC and U.S. treatment of these countries has already changed since their reform and can be expected to become even more favorable....

The authors quantify the impact on Cameroon of three aspects of its new regional trade agreement with the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (the CEMAC agreement): i) improved access to markets in CEMAC; ii) preferential tariff reduction; and iii) reduction of its external tariff...

Many developing countries are considering the privatization of public enterprise natural monopolies. Such as monopolies in charge of electricity, natural gas, waterand sewer, and telephone service. The author tries to answer two questions: (i) how great would the efficiency losses be, if any, if...

This paper analyzes the immediate, delayed and group responses of 20 commodity prices in four commodity groups (foods and livestock, crops, energy and metals) to macroeconomic"news"(unexpected announcements) in the United States between 1985 and 1989. It finds that macroeconomic news generally...

A policy of national exhaustion says that the rights to control distribution, end upon first sale only within a country, thereby permitting rights holders to exclude parallel imports. A policy of international exhaustion states that such rights end upon first sale anywhere, and therefore permits...

Protection may be a second-best policy when the domestic sector is imperfectly competitive. But the optimal tariff depends on labor market institutions too. The author considers two theoretical settings. The first is fully centralized wage bargaining, where all workers are unionized and wage...