Public policy in agriculture and natural resources has proved to be fertile ground for theoretical and empirical analysis. Public policy evaluated by agricultural economists is a complex set of interconnected interventions. These interventions are pervasive throughout developing and developed...

This chapter studies second-best models of nutritional externalities, credit, and incomplete markets for risk, developing implications for welfare-improving government policy using primitive economic building blocks. Using a simple model of altruism wherein the rich obtain utility from the...

Macroeconomic events and policies strongly influence agricultural sector outcomes. Chapters synthesized here delineate both feed-forward and feedback linkages between agriculture and the macroeconomy, examining how relationships change as countries develop and undergo structural transformation....

Rural development policy addresses the welfare of rural households and communities. With a majority of the world's poor located in rural areas, the resilience of rural poverty in industrialized countries, and a significant share of environmental degradation the byproduct of rural poverty, the...

Based on an economy-wide perspective, this paper begins with a discussion of the bias against exports and agriculture that characterized the economic literature and the development strategies in many developing countries after World War II. This is followed by an analysis of how the...