The Brazilian sugar and ethanol story goes like this: direct market intervention overrides market forces. Markets undergo dramatic change. Intervention establishes vested interests. Rent-seeking blocks adjustment to market change. Economic objectives become blurred behind political objectives....

The authors quantitatively assess the consequences of Hungary for three types of policies: removing quantitative import restraints in agriculture, both for all of agriculture and for each of five separate agricultural products; removing the export subsidy program in agriculture; and adopting a...

Most studies of the opening of the Chinese economy focus at the national level. The few existing disaggregated analyses are limited to analyzing changes in agricultural production. The authors use an innovative village equilibrium model that accounts for nonseparability of household production...

To utilize public resources efficiently, it is required to take full advantage of competition in public procurement auctions. Joint bidding practices are one of the possible ways of facilitating auction competition. In theory, there are pros and cons. It may enable firms to pool their financial...

The frequent application of antidumping and countervailing measures in the United States in the 1980s has been described as a new form of protection. The author measures the effect not only of investigations (to evaluation claims of dumping or subsidies) but of the resulting duties, by measuring...

International commodity agreements (ICAs) fit uneasily in a world in which markets are becoming globalized and increasingly competitive. Development policy - both as preached by international agencies and as practiced by typically democratically elected and nonsocialist governments in the major...

In the long view, recent grain price volatility is not anomalous. Wheat, rice, and maize are highly substitutable in the global market for calories, and when aggregate stocks decline to minimal feasible levels, prices become highly sensitive to small shocks, consistent with storage models. In...

The authors examine an issue at the nexus of domestic competition policy and international trade, the interaction between goods trade and market power in domestic trade and distribution sectors. Theory suggests a set of linkages between service-sector competition and goods trade supported by...

The author examines the efficiency and equity of a market allocation of exhaustible resources and assesses the behavior of scarcity measures, such as relative price and rental rates. She finds little evidence of scarcity or impending shortage. Indeed, the evidence points to falling prices and...

The authors examine the degree to which international cotton prices are linked and test whether such links have improved over the past decade. They conclude that the degree of linkage has improved over the past decade, in the short run largely as the result of short-run price transmission -- and...