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...

As growth in world trade outpaces the growth in world Gross Domestic Product (GDP), economies are becoming ever more linked through world markets (Helpman, 1998). It is evident that U.S. agriculture is also becoming increasingly affected by changes or economic shocks in world markets and that...