The Political Economy of Agricultural and Food Policies [Hardcover]

Food and agriculture have been subject to heavy-handed government interventions throughout much of history and across the globe, both in developing and in developed countries.  Today, more than half a trillion US dollars are spent by some governments to support farmers, while other governments impose regulations and taxes that hurt farmers. Some policies, such as price regulations and tariffs, distribute income but reduce total welfare by introducing economic distortions.  Other policies, such as public investments in research, food standards, or land reforms, may increase total welfare, but these policies come also with distributional effects.  These distributional effects influence the preferences of interest groups and in turn influence policy decisions.  Political considerations are therefore crucial to understand how agricultural and food policies are determined, to identify the constraints within which welfare-enhancing reforms are possible (or not), and finally to understand how coalitions can be created to stimulate growth and reduce poverty. The political economy of agricultural and food policy is timely, not just from a policy perspective, but also from the perspective of developments in the literature. Looking back, the 1980s and first half of the 1990s were a very active period in the field of political economy of agricultural protection and policy distortions. This research was triggered by a combination of factors. First and foremost, there was the puzzling question: why was agriculture supported in rich countries and taxed in poor countries? At the same time studies were fueled by emerging general theories of 'new political economy', coming out of the University of Chicago (with the important contributions of Stigler, Peltzman and Becker), the public choice school of Buchanan and Tullock, and the influential work of Downs and Olson. A third factor was the arrival of new data, in particular the dataset assemlC9