Sugar has a long history of being a contentious commodity important in international trade. Initially, the global framework for sugar trade was based on sugarcane, a grass grown in the tropics with trade being dictated largely by the British. In the Napoleonic wars, commercialization of the beet...

This dissertation explores technical regulations (sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures, technical barriers to trade, and geographical indications) in Central American agricultural and food trade. In the first part, a framework to systematically evaluate the broad issues for developing...

This thesis examines the effects on demand, supply, imports, and prices of partial easing of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) barriers to trade in the U.S. market in the case of Mexican avocados. The SPS Agreement plays a role in the avocado market studied here through its implications for...

A large number of concepts related to carbon offset trading policy are currently being discussed such as baseline, leakage, permanence, monitoring, verification, enforcement, financial feasibility, and third party verification. Cutting across these concepts are a variety of risks and...

The improper aggregation of commodities can have important consequences when estimating a system of group demand equations. Generally, aggregates are created under the assumptions that intra-group preferences are homothetic and the consumer's utility function is weakly separable over some...

Vertical integration has received much attention in the last 25 years and there are well-known theories that explain this behavior. However, the one common thread that runs through virtually all of this research is the assumption of private property rights. Very little attention has been paid to...

Using a cross section data collected in 2005, this study uses both parametric and semi-parametric methods to investigate key factors associated with household vulnerability to drought and economic downturns from exposure to shocks in Niger, conditioned on household and community assets. The...