The United States is a large net exporter of corn seeds. Seed trade, including that of corn, has been expanding, but its determinants are not well understood. This paper econometrically investigates the determinants of world demand for U.S. corn seeds with a detailed analysis of trade costs...

For decades, earnings from farming in Latin American countries have been depressed by pro-urban and anti-trade biases in own-country policies and by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. These policies have reduced national and global economic...

The standard approach to modelling coffee prices ignores the impact that changes in government policies and market structures has on coffee prices. These changes have led to large structural breaks in coffee prices implying the standard estimates are biased. This paper models coffee princes in...

Earnings from farming in many low-income countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies, as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduce national and global economic welfare. The...

Australia’s lacklustre economic growth performance in the first four decades following World War II was in part due to an anti-trade, anti-primary sector bias in government assistance policies. This paper provides new annual estimates of the extent of those biases since 1946 and their gradual...

Over the past thirty five years coffee markets have been subject to market controls and regulations culminating in the liberalisation of coffee markets in the early 1990s. This paper models the relationship between the producers’ and world prices of coffee in Brazil, Guatemala and India...

Notwithstanding the tariffication component of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, import tariffs on farm products continue to provide an incomplete indication of the extent to which agricultural producer and consumer incentives are distorted in national markets. As well, in developing...

The Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) is intended to provide contingent protection to poor farmers in developing countries from negative shocks to import prices or from surges in imports. The effects of stochastic import prices and volumes are analysed in a partial equilibrium framework to...

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...

Over the past two decades, earnings from farming in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia have been altered hugely by government sectoral and trade policy reforms. This paper summarizes evidence on the changing extent of distortions to markets for farm products since...