When food prices spike in countries with large numbers of poor people, public intervention is essential to alleviate hunger and malnutrition. For governments, this is also a case of political survival. Government actions often take the form of direct interventions in the market to stabilize food...

Unable to cope fully with steadily climbing world oil prices since mid-2009, many of the 65 countries reviewed in this paper have progressed slowly or even reversed course in reforming pricing of petroleum products. End-user prices in July 2012 varied by two orders of magnitude across the...