William H. Meyers comments on a paper by Belongia and Gilbert presented at the 1986 annual meetings of the Allied Social Science Association. Belongia and Gilbert analyzed the scope of farm income and debt problems in the Plains States and discussed the causes of those problems. Meyers accepts...

Many farmers are currently facing severe financial stress resulting in asset liquidations, problems in obtaining credit, and even bankruptcy. An important question in policy analysis is the applicability of traditional farm policy approaches to the problem of financial stress in agriculture....

The current round of negotiations of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) represents a major initiative of economic reform. Initiatives for trade reform are far from new. A facilitative framework has been proposed that ranks policies according to their level of price...

Because of the short-term nature of existing futures contracts, farmers are subject to intertemporal income uncertainty, yet price stabilization may be detrimental because it negates the benefits of (intertemporal) production flexibility. Multiyear futures, if they existed, would be preferred to...

The Baltic Republics have undertaken extensive price reforms for food and agricultural products. Higher producer and consumer prices, accompanied by wage increases and income subsidies to offset higher prices, are expected to improve market efficiency. The goal is to move toward private...

The signing of the Food Security Act of 1985 (FSA 85), by President Reagan in December 1985 culminated a lengthy deliberation process involving food producing and consuming groups throughout the United States. During the debate, an analysis of a wide range of policy options for the 1985 Farm...

Experiences in transition economies have shown that the simultaneity of macroeconomic and sectoral reforms is important to the success of both. In Lithuania, macroeconomic, agrarian, and other sectoral reforms were implemented concurrently. Real wages and income have declined sharply, inflation...

Competing claims regarding the complementarity of U.S. development assistance to less developed countries (LDCs) and U.S. agricultural exports have long been discussed by researchers, policymakers, and agricultural producers. The relationship between U.S. development assistance to LDCs and LC...

Lithuania has been progressing rapidly in the privatization of agriculture and the development of market economy mechanisms. An important component of the transition reforms has been the deregulation of input, farm, and consumer prices. The context, processes, and results of the price policies...

Various measures have been proposed to "harmonize" agricultural policies in the United States and the European Community. Short-run and long-run consequences of implementing three such measures are evaluated using econometric models developed by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research...