Commodity price volatility in international markets has been used to justify numerous policy interventions, including the need for buffer stocks and counter-cyclical payments. The common measure of volatility, the standard deviation or coefficient of variation, likely overstates the actual...

Current projections indicate that by 2025, water scarcity will affect over one quarter of the world’spopulation. This suggests that the need to manage water more efficiently will become more pressingduring the next few years as the demand for water increases along with the expansion...

Countries cooperate in negotiating treaties. However, treaty compliance is noncooperative; signatories comply with treaties only if compliance leaves them better off than noncompliance. US and EC agricultural policies of 1986 are modeled through a noncooperative game. Bilateral treaties,...

A simple two-sector endogenous growth model of government spending and growth is developed with a producing and a lobbying sector. Lobbyists divert government spending for private gains. One key innovation is this: With democratization, information (and power) becomes more diffused (public),...

This paper analyzes the economy-wide gains obtainable from the allocation of surface irrigation water to its most productive use, and evaluates a decentralized mechanism for achieving this result in a spatially heterogeneous environment. The focus country for the analysis is Morocco. The...

This paper uses an endogenous growth model to examine the interaction between trade, economic growth, and the environment. We find that whether trade enhances or retards growth depends on the relation between factor intensities of exportable, importable, and R&D and the relative abundance of the...

We investigate the dynamics of nonrenewable resource abundance on economic growth and welfare in a two-country world. One country is endowed with a nonrenewable-resource, otherwise, countries are identical, except possibly for their initial endowments of capital. Unlike previous studies...

The effects of environment on trade and welfare are analyzed in a modifiedHeckscher-Ohlin framework using a quasi-homothetic preferences to account for differences incountries' expenditure shares on health. Three types of pollution, local-disembodied, global-disembodiedand embodied, result as a...

This paper focuses on estimating the effects of the real FDI-weighted exchange rate on realU.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) in the global processed food industry. We use a straightforwardproduction possibility framework as our theoretical basis to demonstrate the shift ofproduction between...