World trade talks have foundered recently, in part due to developing country demands that industrialised countries reduce their large farm support programmes to allow poor farmers in the global South to compete more fairly. But are subsidies really the problem? For some crops – most notably cotton and sugar – Northern subsidies clearly are a root cause of low international prices and unfair com...

This paper quantifies the aggregate impact of various subsidies enjoyed by China's exporting firms in the electronics and communications equipment manufacturing sectors, which nearly makes up the majority of China's exports. Using firm level data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics for 2007, the peak year for China’s trade surplus, we find that although within some narrowly defined indus...

In India, electric utilities are owned and operated by the government. This paper explores whether these utilities have functioned to maximize social welfare and whether electricity pricing, through the provision of agricultural subsidies, has been manipulated for political purposes. We first explore the benefits of electricity subsidies to the agricultural sector between 1995 and 2004. A simpl...

This paper examines regulatory incentive mechanisms for efficient investment in the transmission network, taking into account both technological externalities among transmission lines and information asymmetry between the regulator and the transmission company (Transco). First, by adding extra constraints associated with the power flow, we develop an extended price cap mechanism that can intern...

A growing amount of literature investigates the contribution of subsidies to productivity growth and increase in competitiveness of firms. Understanding of the impact of the subsidies on regional productivity growth is essential for the assessment of the effectiveness of public policy. This paper evaluates the impact of subsidies on technological progress, allocative efficiency and economics of...

U.S. employment-based health benefits are exempt from income and payroll taxes, an exemption that provided tax subsidies of $326.2 billion in 2015. Both liberal and conservative economists have denounced these subsidies as “regressive” and lauded a provision of the Affordable Care Act—the Cadillac Tax—that would curtail them. The claim that the subsidies are regressive rests on estimates showin...

Is universal social assistance unaffordable? Targeting policy has been praised as a magic solution to select the ‘deserving poor’ and efficiently use scarce resources in Global South. The article tests unaffordability hypothesis using five counterfactual analyses based on expenditure redirection (military expenditure, energy subsidies, potential illegal/odious external debt servicing) increasin...

Although the study of resource subsidies has emerged as a key topic in both ecosystem and food web ecology, the dialogue over their role has been limited by separate approaches that emphasize either subsidy quantity or quality. Considering quantity and quality together may provide a simple, but previously unexplored, framework for identifying the mechanisms that govern the importance of subsidi...

There is a large empirical literature on policy measures targeted at children but surprisingly very little theoretical foundation to ground the debate on the optimality of the different instruments. In the present paper, we examine the merit of targeting children through two general policies, namely selective commodity taxation and cash transfer to family with children. We consider a household ...

Attitude change is a critical component of health behavior change, but has rarely been studied longitudinally following extensive exposures to persuasive materials such as full-length movies, books, or plays. We examined changes in attitudes related to food production and consumption in college students who had read Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma as part of a University-wide readi...