This note examines in detail Brazil’s export performance over the past 15 years, focusing not only on growth and composition, but also on different performance dimensions, including diversification, sophistication, and firm dynamics. The analysis uses international comparisons to better...

When prices spike in international grain markets, national governments often reduce the extent to which that spike affects their domestic food markets. Those actions exacerbate the price spike and international welfare transfer associated with the terms of trade change. Several recent analyses...

Confidence in combining inflation-targeting-cum-flexible-exchange-rate regimes with isolated microprudential regulation as a means to guarantee both macroeconomic and financial stability has been shattered by the scale and synchronization of asset price booms and busts that preceded the current...

For decades the world's agricultural markets have been highly distorted by national government policies, but very differently for different commodities. Hence a weighted average across countries of nominal rates of assistance or consumer tax equivalents for a product can be misleading as an...

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...

Despite recent reforms, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of those price distortions can be poor guides to the policies'economic effects. Recent theoretical literature provides indicators of trade and welfare-reducing effects of...

Notwithstanding the tariffication component of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, import tariffs on farm products continue to provide an incomplete indication of the extent to which agricultural producer and consumer incentives are distorted in national markets. Especially in developing...