This paper deals with the effect of constitutional rules on agricultural policy outcomes in a panel of observations for more than 70 developing and developed countries in the 1955-2005 period. Testable hypotheses are drawn from recent developments in the comparative politics literature that see...

Since 2004 there has been a sharp decrease in border protection for the EU rice industry. Because the EU grants trade preferences to a considerable number of rice exporting developing countries, the reform implied preference erosion as well. By addressing the impact of preference erosion on...

This study analyzes the sensitivity of trade flows to trade barriers from gravity equations, using different econometric techniques recently highlighted in the literature. Specifically, we compare a benchmark OLS fixed effects specification a la Feenstra (2002) with three emerging estimation...

This paper deals with the quantification of GMO regulations on bilateral trade flows. A composite index of the complexity of such regulations for sixty countries as well as an objective score for six GMO regulatory sub-dimensions has been developed. Using a gravity model, we show how bilateral...

This paper documents patterns in international trade costs in processed foods for a large cross-section of developing and developed countries, during the 1976-2000 period. A trade costs index is inferred from a micro-founded gravity equation that incorporates bilateral `iceberg?trade costs. For...

We investigate the effect of electoral rules and firms of government on public policy outcomes using a new dataset on agriculture and food policies from 74 countries over the 1960-2005 period. Using both cross-sectional and panel data analyses we find robust evidence that the specific nature of...

Using a bilateral trade equation derived from a monopolistic competition model, we investigated market access reciprocity in food trade among the US, Canada, the EU and Japan. We explore country and industry-specific market access asymmetry through the border effect approach, re-challenging the...