Until the Uruguay Round, agricultural trade policies were subject to few multilateral disciplines. In this situation, the interplay of special-interest lobbying pressures resulted in this sector becoming heavily distorted. One of the great achievements of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations...

Patent protection was introduced for plant biotechnology in the United States in 1985, and it affected crops differentially depending on their reproductive structures. Exploiting this unique feature of plant physiology and a new dataset of crop-specific technology development, I find that the...

This paper provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of agricultural trade using a gravity model. The data set covers bilateral trade in agricultural goods for 152 countries over the periods 1990-93 and 1999-2002. The estimations support claims that protectionism and distortive...