The Middle East and North Africa region is arguably the most politically volatile and food insecure area on earth. The sum of civil disruption and endemic food-security constraints has reduced many MENA nations to the equivalent of small, import-dependent countries, regardless of population....

This paper examines the factors affecting prices in the North America banana market. There are substantial price differences between brand name and "generic" companies, and among branded companies. Key questions are what causes these price differences, how are they related to the brand-names of...

Recent periods of high and volatile food prices have prompted several import-dependent Arab micro-states to consider at least some domestic production, among other proposals, as a way of mitigating extremely volatile food prices, which even in rich micro-states can have adverse health and...

The international transfer pricing norm is the "arm"s length " standard where prices are set as if related parties were transacting as unrelated parties. The modem theory of the firm, however, argues that the types of transactions that take place within firms differ significantly from market...

This paper presents an in-class experiment used as a teaching tool in an introductory microeconomics class at the undergraduate college level. It is directed at a critical but challenging concept for principles students — constrained utility maximization and a methodology to intuit...

This paper extends the literature on consumer decision-making and energy efficiency through recourse to insights from behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. This approach is motivated by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) new regulations mandating more stringent energy-efficiency standards...

This article investigates changes in capital stock composition that are caused by Abstract changing statutory tax rates in a pure Haig-Simons net income tax. Such a tax system allows the deduction of economic depreciation. An increase in the statutory tax rate results in an increase in the...

When Contracting Parties finally signed the Uruguay Round GATT Agreements, then EC Members were split on reform of the EC banana import regime. An ambiguous legal outcome allowed EC States to sign the GATT accords while reserving the right to challenge the EC banana regime, defended adamantly by...

This note provides a general concept of how the conflict of interest between credit rating agencies and financial entities that hire them to rate issues can be severed. The concept stresses addressing the conflict with minimal government regulation. Only a skeleton concept is offered -- the goal...