OBJECTIVES Price is a key obstacle for consumer access to essential drugs, especially in developing countries. This study sought to compare the retail prices of essential drugs on the private market in Brazil with that of two international pricing standards. METHODS The retail price of all drugs on Brazil's Essential Drugs List, July 2000 edition, were compared to the retail price of the same...

Trade and food security discussions have changed significantly in recent years, reflecting a more general change in perspective on “the right price of food” (Swinnen 2011). Until 2007 the dominant view was that low prices for agricultural products were causing poverty and food insecurity among poor households in developing countries. Trade policy discussions emphasized the importance of reducin...

BACKGROUND WHO and Health Action International (HAI) have developed a standardised method for surveying medicine prices, availability, affordability, and price components in low-income and middle-income countries. Here, we present a secondary analysis of medicine availability in 45 national and subnational surveys done using the WHO/HAI methodology. METHODS Data from 45 WHO/HAI surveys in 36 ...

Farmland values in the states of the Tenth Federal Reserve District rose about 5.5 percent over the year ended June 30, 1997 (McDaniel and Lamb). Indeed, over the past two years prices in many parts of the country have risen sharply. The jump in farmland values comes at a time of dynamic change in the farm sector. Last year, the federal government enacted sweeping farm legislation that both low...

Farmland values are booming across much of the nation and farm credit conditions are solid. There are few exceptions to these broad-based trends according to results of surveys of agricultural credit conditions conducted by several Federal Reserve district banks. Farm and ranch land values have been climbing in recent years, but have showed particular strength since mid-2004. Strong farm income...

Empirical tests of the relationship between international competitiveness and the severity of environmental regulations are hampered by the lack of pollution abatement cost data for nonU.S. countries. The theory of the firm suggests that environmental stringency can be measured by the difference between a polluting input’s shadow price and its market price. We make a first attempt at quantifyin...

Production agriculture in Rural America has two major problems. The first is that it has long-term excess productive capacity at acceptable prices. The second, accentuated by the recent change in Federal farm program policy, is widely fluctuating prices with their resulting “boom and bust” cycles. These severely damage the economies of communities in which production agriculture provides the ma...

Farm households in developing countries are generally credit constrained. This forces them to simultaneously take production and consumption decisions. In this paper, a two-period lifecycle model of the farm household is constructed and the household’s investment response to changes in land and agricultural output prices are derived theoretically. It is shown that in the absence of credit marke...

On the 26 of June 2003, an agreement was reached by agricultural ministers to reform the Common Agricultural Policy. Decoupling direct payments from farm output and reductions of administrative prices are core elements of this reform. Major reform goals are less output of cereals, beef, sugar and milk, stabilised farm incomes and a more competitive farm sector. Model simulations show that these...

Japan's rice sector is supported by high prices paid by consumers that allow many farm households to maintain small rice farms. Japan's government controls trade within a tariff-rate quota and imposes a prohibitively high tariff on imports outside the quota. Within Japan, diversion programs pay farmers to substitute other crops for rice since, without government-mandated diversion, supply would...