Most developing countries strive to improve agricultural productivity by relaxing credit constraints, supplying better inputs, improving marketing and distribution. However the efficacy of these reforms needs to be examined in the context of the behavioral responses of farming households. This...

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/25/09.

We investigate the Philippine government's price stabilization policy for rice. Seemingly Unrelated Regressions are used to examine the effectiveness of the program at regional and national levels over a 21-year period (January 1983 to December 2003). Results of the regional analysis indicate...

Conventional estimates of the economic return to agricultural research use market prices for the values of products and inputs; on this basis, economic rates of return are typically well above the cost of capital, suggesting that more investment in research would be socially desirable. But these...

Cover material, Table of contents, In memoriam article for William O. Jones, William A. Masters' Article

We measured the farm-level impacts of Malawi’s Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) on fertiliser use and maize yields in central and southern Malawi. Using multiple rounds of panel data and an instrumental variable regression strategy to control for endogenous selection into the subsidy...

In the 1980s, the Producer Subsidy Equivalent (PSE) became the dominant measure of protection in applied studies of international agricultural trade. This paper analyzes potential biases in the ratio form of the PSE introduced by using actual domestic prices rather than social opportunity costs...

This paper describes agricultural policy choices and tests some predictions of political economy theories. It begins with three broad stylized facts: governments tend to tax agriculture in poorer countries, and subsidize it in richer ones, tax both imports and exports more than nontradables, and...