Following the global spike in food prices in 2008, there has been a renewed interest in food security. A modest increase in prices over long-term trend in 2009, and some forecasts of higher commodity prices in the longer term, have reinforced concerns. In addition to the concerns with relatively...

A central theme of the invasion biology literature is to predict the introduction and spread of biological invasions but predictive models rarely are applied to inform invasion management. Here, we demonstrate the utility of a spatio-temporal predictive model that has been used to inform...

The presence of transaction costs in trading implies a non-linear adjustment process of real exchange rates towards Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). This may make the traditional tests for PPP using a linear framework --- ones that generally tend to refute the PPP hypothesis --- unreliable....

Conventional wisdom suggests that subsidising biofuel production will reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper shows that in many cases, and for a wide range of parameter values, this is not true. Biofuel subsidies can generate supply-side response by fossil fuel producers that...

Extensive land and market reform in Vietnam has resulted in dramatic increases in rice output over the past thirty years. The land and market reforms in agriculture were pervasive, moving the system of rice production from commune-based public ownership and control to one with effective private...

Poultry sectors’ domestic support and trade protection, or assistance, influences the way they develop, in particular their structure, trade, investments, and aspects of disease risk. Nominal Rates of Assistance (NRAs) measuring adjusted gaps between international and domestic prices were used...

Foreign aid in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been heavily criticised on the grounds that it has undermined incentives for domestic revenue collection, encouraged irresponsible expenditure behaviour and high levels of public debt, and contributed to the poor composition of government spending...

Using the Survey of Living Conditions in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar of India and the second round of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey, this paper examines whether and to what extent rural consumption inequality of the poor differs in the two countries. While these two countries have experienced...

This paper measures the extent to which donor finance has contributed to higher rates of spending in three key development sectors of the PNG economy—health, education and infrastructure between 1974 and 2008. Results show that high rates of fungibility have occurred within PNG during this...

Standard tests of the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson (HBS) hypothesis treat productivity levels in and across countries as fixed and observable, and offer little empirical support for the hypothesis. If productivity follows a jump-diffusion process, these standard tests will generate biased estimates,...