To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa's slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices to...

A study of distortions to agricultural incentives in 18 developing countries during 1960-84, by Krueger, Schiff and Valdes (1988, 1991), found that policies in most of those developing countries were directly or indirectly harming their farmers. Since the mid-1980s there has been a substantial...

Australia‘s export-led growth in demand for commercial bottled wine was based in part on producer freedom (relative to Europeans) to blend wines across the full range of varieties and geographic regions, so as to be able to reproduce year after year a consistent style for each label. Over...

We provide economy-wide modeling results of the national and regional implications of two current challenges facing the Australian wine industry: a decline in export demand for premium wines, and a possible change in the tax on domestic wine sales following the Henry Review of Taxation. The...

Agricultural protection in rich countries, which had depressed Australian farm incomes via its impact on Australia's terms of trade, has diminished over the past two decades. So too has agricultural export taxation in poor countries, which had the opposite impact on those terms of trade....

For decades the worldÂ’s agricultural markets have been highly distorted by national government policies, but very differently for different commodities such that a ranking of weighted average nominal rates of assistance across countries can be misleading as an indicator of the trade or...

Every decade or so, food becomes newsworthy globally because of a price spike, either upwards (hurting consumers, as in 1973 and 2008) or downwards (hurting farmers in open economies, as in 1986). Most such price spikes are a consequence of major policy shifts, since local weather-induced supply...

For decades, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies, as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduce national and global economic...