The first generation of genetically modified (GM) crop varieties sought to increase farmer profitability through cost reductions or higher yields. The next generation of GM food research is focusing also on breeding for attributes of interest to consumers, beginning with ‘golden rice’,...

Agricultural biotechnologies, and especially transgenic crops, have the potential to offer higher incomes to biotech firms and farmers, and lower-priced and better quality food for consumers. However, the welfare effects of adoption of genetically modified (GM) food and feed crop varieties are...

The economic welfare implications of some countries using new genetically modified varieties in crop production will depend on which countries choose to adopt them and on whether others (notably Western Europe) ban their importation. They also depend on existing (non-GMOspecific) agricultural...

The first generation of genetically modified crop varieties, currently most widespread in the maize and soybean sectors, sought to increase farmer profitability by improving agronomic traits. The next generation of biotech research is focusing also on breeding for attributes desired by...

National barriers to trade are often varied to insulate domestic markets from international price variability. This paper explores the extent of that behavior by governments using estimates of agricultural price distortions in 75 countries. Newly estimated price transmission elasticities are...

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...

For decades, trade between countries in agricultural products has been distorted by policies of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Agricultural trade has often also been limited by an anti-agricultural, pro-urban bias in many developing country policies....

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but...

Food prices in international markets spiked upwards in 2008, doubling or more in a matter of months. Evidence is still being compiled on policy responses over the following two years, but new time series estimates of government intervention for the previous five decades allow insights into past...

A decline in governmental distortions to agricultural and other trade since the 1980s has contributed to economic growth and poverty alleviation globally. But new modeling results suggest that has taken the world only three-fifths of the way towards freeing merchandise trade, and that farm...