Product differentiation is well established as being the key source of the cereal industry’s high price-cost margins. However, there is little consensus as to whether pricing collusion is also a source of profitability, and indeed, whether price even serves as a strategic variable in this...

Strategic trade theory offers a way of conceptualizing and testing for strategic government interventions in imperfectly competitive international markets. This survey critically assesses recent empirical evidence, with a focus on food and agricultural markets. One finding is that while many...

The Uruguay Round's built-in agenda for future WTO negotiations omitted further liberalization in manufactures, yet this paper shows that there are large potential gains to be had from such tariff cuts, especially in the developing countries. In order to fully estimate the benefits of adding...

This paper assesses, both theoretically and empirically, the determinants of differential gains from trade policy reform across countries. The theoretical model shows that asymmetrical features of the world economy, including the relative size of the differentiated products sector in each...

Rapid industrialization in East Asia, particularly China, is raising questions about who will feed the region in the next century and how Asia will pay for its food imports. The paper addresses this question by first reviewing existing food sector projections and then taking an economy-wide...

Using a 10-region, 12-sector model of the global economy, projected forward to 2005 with and without implementation of the Uruguay Round (UR) trade agreements, we confirm earlier expectations that Africa is likely to be the only major region of the world to lose from UR implementation--but find...

This paper develops a general framework for the analysis of marketing margins and the food system. It extends previous work by: (i) disaggregating farm-level production, food processing and food wholesale/retail activities, (ii) introducing closure with respect to production and consumption in...

The paper examines results presented by Batra in an article entitled "The Fallacy of Free Trade" (1992). Batra contends that technical change in Japanese manufacturing necessarily reduces US real wages in the confines of a two-good, two-country Ricardo-Viner model. A parsimonious empirical...