The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transfirmational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This article reviews and synthesizes...

For millennia alcoholic drinks have played an important role in food security and health (both positive and negative), but consumption patterns of beer, wine and spirits have altered substantially over the past two centuries. So too have their production technologies and industrial organization....

When liability for environmental spills, product failures, or other types of accidents is imposed on firms with insufficient wealth, those firms may file for bankruptcy ---thereby becoming ''judgement proof''--- as soon as a major accident occurs. As a result, they are unlikely to choose...

Superfund cleanup has been extremely slow. Traditional analysis has centred around reducing the heavy negotiation and litigation to expedite the cleanup process. This paper investigates other factors which provide possible incentives for the PRPs to delay the cleanup, namely discounting, risk...

This paper describes the major issues in the clearing of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives and the current regulative initiatives aimed at removing the market opaqueness. The core of the paper is the comparison of the US Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the European...

We analyze the effects of high standards food chains on household welfare taking into account general equilibrium effects and market imperfections. To measure structural production changes and welfare effects on rural and urban households, our model has two types of agents, five kinds of...

During the past decades the global food system changed dramatically with increased trade in high-value food products, increased exports from developing countries, increased consolidation and dominance of large multinational food companies, and increased proliferation of public and private food...

Transition countries provide a natural experiment to study the development of land markets. This paper provides survey-evidence of the variation in the development of land markets, identifies a series of patterns, and provides a set of hypotheses to explain these variations in land market...

The 2003 reform of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) under Commissioner Fischler was the most radical in the history of the CAP. This paper analyzes the causes and constraints of the 2003 reform. The paper argues that an unusual combination of pro-reform factors such as...

Agricultural value chains, particularly in the developing world, have been going through drastic changes over the past decades. Differences in world market participation and access to value chain technologies might however have resulted in uneven experiences across countries. In this paper, we...