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For more than a century, government policies have grossly distorted resource use in agriculture, both within and between countries. Earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a prourban 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 welfare and inhibit economic growth; they also add to inequality and poverty in developing countries. Since the 1980s, however, numerous developing and some high-income country governments have reduced their sectoral and trade policy distortions. This paper draws on new empirical studies to show the changing extent of policy distortions to prices faced by the world's farmers since the 1950s. Modeling results provide an indication of how far those reforms proceeded between the early 1980s and 2004 and of how much scope remains for removing continuing inefficiencies in global agricultural resource use.

For more than a century, government policies have grossly distorted resource use in agriculture, both within and between countries. Earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a prourban 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 welfare and inhibit economic growth; they also add to inequality and poverty in developing countries. Since the 1980s, however, numerous developing and some high-income country governments have reduced their sectoral and trade policy distortions. This paper draws on new empirical studies to show the changing extent of policy distortions to prices faced by the world's farmers since the 1950s. Modeling results provide an indication of how far those reforms proceeded between the early 1980s and 2004 and of how much scope remains for removing continuing inefficiencies in global agricultural resource use.

"Despite numerous policy reforms since the 1980s, farm product prices remain heavily distorted in both high-income and developing countries. This book seeks to improve our understanding of why societies adopted these policies, and why some but not other countries have undertaken reforms. Drawing on recent developments in political economy theories and in the generation of empirical measures of the extent of price distortions, the present volume provides both analytical narratives of the historical origins of agricultural protectionism in various parts of the world and a set of political econometric analyses aimed at explaining the patterns of distortions that have emerged over the past five decades. These new studies shed much light on the forces affecting incentives and those facing farmers in the course of national and global economic and political development. They also show how those distortions might change in the future - or be changed by concerted actions to offset pressures from vested interests"--

This article investigates cap-and-trade markets in the presence of both political and market distortions. We create a model where dominant firms have the ability to rent seek for a share of pollution permits as well as influence the market equilibrium with their choice of permit exchange because of market power. We derive the equilibrium and show the interaction of these two distortions has consequences for the resulting marginal inefficiency—the extent to which a re-allocation of permits between firms can reduce equilibrium abatement costs. We find that if the regulator is not very responsive to rent seeking then marginal inefficiency reduces relative to the case without rent seeking. When the regulator is very responsive to rent seeking, if dominant rent-seeking firms are all permit buyers (sellers) then marginal inefficiency reduces (increases) relative to the case without rent seeking

Food consumption changes during transition are analysed using a resource-based cereal equivalent measure to identify three defining turning points: (1) the initial drop in food consumption (experienced by all countries except Romania); (2) stabilisation of food consumption at the new, lower level (reached by CEECs and the Baltic States but not by the former USSR as a whole); (3) achievement of market consumption levels consistent with levels of real income (reached by Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia). Country agricultural self-sufficiency measures are calculated yielding policy implications as accession to the European Union is contemplated by many transitional countries. (Comparative Economic Studies / SWP)

"Despite numerous policy reforms since the 1980s, farm product prices remain heavily distorted in both high-income and developing countries. This book seeks to improve our understanding of why societies adopted these policies, and why some but not other countries have undertaken reforms. Drawing on recent developments in political economy theories and in the generation of empirical measures of the extent of price distortions, the present volume provides both analytical narratives of the historical origins of agricultural protectionism in various parts of the world and a set of political econometric analyses aimed at explaining the patterns of distortions that have emerged over the past five decades. These new studies shed much light on the forces affecting incentives and those facing farmers in the course of national and global economic and political development. They also show how those distortions might change in the future - or be changed by concerted actions to offset pressures from vested interests"--

Introduction to The General Theory of Second Best, Its Central Implications, and the Appropriate Way to Respond to It -- The Economics Profession's Responses to The General Theory of Second Best: Descriptions and Critiques -- The Concept of "the Impact of a Choice (or Natural Event) on Economic Efficiency" -- "First-Best," "Second-Best," and "Third-Best" Definitions, Elaborations, and Other Economists' Usages -- The Symbols for Various Pareto Imperfections, Private and Allocative Concepts, Categories of Resource-Uses, and Categories of Resource Allocations -- The Vocabulary and Symbols of Distortion Analysis -- Analyses of Various Step-Wise Monopoly Distortions -- The Various Non-Monopoly Step-Wise Private-Benefit, Private-Cost, and Profit Distortions -- Some Negative and Positive Implications of the TBLE Distortion-Analysis Protocol for Economic-Efficiency Prediction/Post-Diction -- The Approach That Would Be TBLE for a Government to Take to Economic-Efficiency Prediction/Post-diction—the Rest of the Story -- Conclusion.