Commissioned by the CGIAR Science Council and prepared as a Background Paper for the 2008 World Development Report of the World Bank.

The United States was the first country in the world to explicitly offer intellectual property protection for plant varieties. Beginning in 1930, asexually reproduced plants were afforded plant patent protection, in 1970 sexually propagated plants could be awarded plant variety protection...

In this paper we review some recent studies of the impact of National Competition Policy on rural Australia. National Competition Policy has tended to assume that both domestic and international deregulation of industry leads to a shift from a noncompetitive to a competitive industry structure....

The Chinese government introduced some pro-farmed policies in the mid 1990s. This has caused some concerns from other countries on whether and how such policy initiatives would affect China's agricultural trade. This study uses OECD's methodology to calculate producer support estimates (PSEs)...

The main purposes of this study are to quantitatively investigate the production structure and the pattern of technical change in Thai agriculture for the period of 1972-94. A translog variable cost function framework is used to estimate a system of the cost function and the associated cost...