The authors examine the growth and convergence of total factor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing in a large sample of countries spanning many levels of development over the period 1967-1992. There is a widely held but rarely tested view that the rate of growth in agricultural...

The authors provide a simple introduction to the economics of the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) and use available empirical evidence to examine its impact on exports of garments and textiles, focusing on India. Their review of the basic economics of the MFA shows the discriminatory character of...

Vietnam's accession into the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) has been an important step in its integration into the world economy. The authors use a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model to evaluate how different trade liberalization policies of Vietnam and its main...

The author offers an economic assessment of the opportunities and challenges provided by the World Trade Organization's Doha Development Agenda, particularly through agricultural trade liberalization, for low-income countries seeking to trade their way out of poverty. After discussing links...

Australia's lackluster economic growth performance in the first four decades following World War II was in part due to an anti-trade, anti-primary sector bias in government assistance policies. This paper provides new annual estimates of the extent of those biases since 1946 and their gradual...

The first generation of genetically modified (GM) crop varieties sought to increase producer profitability through cost reductions or higher yields, while the next generation of GM food research is focusing on breeding for attributes of interest to consumers. Golden Rice, for example, has been...

Many fear China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will impoverish its rural people by way of greater import competition in its agricultural markets. Anderson, Huang, and Ianchovichina explore that possibility bearing in mind that, even if producer prices of some (land-intensive)...

A common-agency lobbying model is developed to help understand why North America and the European Union have adopted such different policies toward genetically modified (GM) food. Results show that when firms (in this case farmers) lobby policy makers to influence standards and consumers and...

High youth unemployment rates may be a signal of difficult labor market entry for youth or may reflect high churning. The European and United States literature finds the latter conclusion while the Latin American literature suggests the former. This paper uses panel data to examine whether Latin...

This paper solves and estimates a stochastic model of optimal inter-temporal behavior to assess how changes in the design of the unemployment benefits and pension systems in Brazil could affect savings rates, the share of time that individuals spend outside of the formal sector, and retirement...