For decades, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban 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 agricultural trade and economic growth. They almost certainly add to inequality and p...

Trade and Migration with Renewable Natural Resources: Out-of-Steady-State Dynamics Commodity price increases associated with the entry of China, India and other countries into the world economy has led to increased pressure on common-property renewable natural resources (NR). The problem is particularly worrisome for economies that obtain a large share of their income from the exploitation of N...

Exploiting the historical variations in the structure of the international co ee bean market, I separately identify the e ects of an international cartel agreement and the emergence of a fringe exporting country on the market power and the commodity's price. The results suggest that, of the 75-percent drop in the real co ee price between 1988 and 2001, the cartel's breakdown explains 49 points ...

The expansion of trade in pre-industrial Europe led to a transformation of agriculture. It induced specialization to exploit comparative advantage as well as a restructuring of the process of production, with manorial agriculture giving way to an agriculture of family farms. Technological progress was not itself a driving force, but rather a consequence of this transformation. Merchants and urb...

We study markets for a good whose safety (the seller’s type), cannot be costlessly observed by the buyer. Using a costly state verification model with inter-temporal correlation in types, we identify contractual arrangements that induce sellers to report unsafe products voluntarily. Perfect, but costly, verification (audits) and an exogenous publicly provided noisy signal (forecast) can provide...

This paper discusses issues raised for OECD agricultural and agriculture-related policies by the policy coherence for development perspective. These issues are organised in a five-fold typology covering OECD domestic agricultural policy, agricultural trade policy, regulatory policies, development cooperation policy as well as the coherence of developing country policies. Changes in OECD agricul...

The aim of this contribution is to study empirically the effect of trade liberalization on productivity growth exploiting a large micro-dataset of more than 20,000 French and Italian food firms, over the 2004-2012 period. This relationship has been studied focusing on import penetration at both industry and upstream sectors level, to investigate the role played by imports in intermediate inputs...

This article adds technology choice to a free-entry Cournot model with linear demand and constant marginal costs. Firms can choose from a discrete set of technologies. This simple framework yields non-existence of equilibrium, existence of multiple equilibria and equilibria in which ex-ante identical ̄rms choose di®erent technologies as possible outcomes. I provide a full characterization of th...