Maximum Residue Limits (MRLs) on pesticides and veterinary drugs in plant and animal products are established to promote food safety and animal and plant health. In practice, however, they are often accused of creating unnecessary trade barriers. The controversy is more prominent when a given...

A parsimonious demand modeling approach has been developed for the annual USDA-ERS International Food Security Assessment. The approach incorporates price effects, food quality variation across income deciles, and consistent aggregation over income deciles and food qualities. The approach is...

NTMs, Agricultural and Food Trade, and Competitiveness  Special Issue of The World Economy (forthcoming). Selected Papers from a European Commission co-funded Project on Assessment the Impacts of Non-tariff Measures on Competitiveness of the EU and Selected Trade Partners. Guest Editors: John...

We provide an ex-post econometric examination of the harmonization and tightening of the EU Maximum Residues Limit (MRL) on aflatoxins in 2002, and its impact on African exports of groundnut products. We show that the MRL set by the EU has no significant trade impact on groundnut exports from...

This paper provides a systematic welfare-based approach to analyze the impact of non-tariff measures (NTMs) on trade and welfare in presence of market imperfections. We focus on standard-like measures such as technical barriers and sanitary and phytosanitary regulations. The approach overcomes...

This Introduction summarizes some of the key research findings of the papers in this special issue of The World Economy drawn from a European Commission co-funded project on non-tariff measures (NTMs) affecting agri-food trade of the EU and its trade partners. The project created a large...

We extend the trade restrictiveness indices (TRIs) approach to the case of market failures and domestic regulations addressing them, in presence of arbitrary tariffs and other domestic price policy distortions. We focus on standard-like non-tariff measures (NTMs) affecting cost of production and...

We investigate major conjectures regarding the prevalence of cosmetic surgical procedures and their determinants, using a quantitative multidisciplinary approach and a recent international dataset from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. Cosmetic surgery predominantly...

Note April 9, 2012: we found an error in the program calculating the commodity scores. We are holding the working paper temporarily and will be posting a corrected paper soon. The authors.We propose aggregation indices of Non-Tariff Measures (NTMs) to quantify their protectionism relative to...

In the context of U.S. farm policy, this paper analyzes the effect that expectations about base acreage and yield updating in future policies have on a farmer's production decisions in the presence of price, yield and policy uncertainty. We consider a risk averse farmer producing a single crop...