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Infrastructure is an important driving force for economic growth. It reduces trade and transaction costs and stimulates the productivity of the economy. Africa has been lagging behind in the global manufacturing market. Among others, infrastructure is an important constraint in many African countries. Using firm-level data for East Africa, the paper reexamines the relationship between firm performance and infrastructure. It is shown that labor costs are by far the most important to stimulate firm production. Among the infrastructure sectors, electricity costs have the highest output elasticity, followed by transport costs. In addition, the paper shows that the quality of infrastructure is important to increase firm production. In particular, quality transport infrastructure seems to be essential. The paper also finds that agglomeration economies can reduce firm costs. The agglomeration elasticity is estimated at 0.03–0.04.

This case study analyses the effects of the Danish pesticide tax (1996-2013) on agriculture which was introduced as an ad valorem tax in 1996, doubled in 1998, and redesigned in 2013 as a tax based on the toxicity of the pesticides. The Danish pesticide taxes probably represent the world’s highest pesticide taxes on agriculture, which makes it interesting to analyze how effective they have been. Here the effects of the ad valorem tax (1996-2013) are analyzed. The case study demonstrates the challenges of choosing an optimal tax design in a complex political setting where, additionally, not all individuals in the target group necessarily react to the economic incentives as predicted by economic modeling. It also demonstrates that a small first green-tax-step over time might develop into a better tax design.

This paper summarizes a new database that sheds light on the impact of trade-related policy developments over the past half century on distortions to agricultural incentives and thus also to consumer prices for food in 75 countries spanning the per capita income spectrum. Price support policies of advanced economies hurt not only domestic consumers and exporters of other products but also foreign producers and traders of farm products, and they reduce national and global economic welfare. On the other hand, the governments of many developing countries have directly taxed their farmers over the past half-century, both directly (e.g., export taxes) and also indirectly via overvaluing their currency and restricting imports of manufactures. Thus the price incentives facing farmers in many developing countries have been depressed by both own-country and other countries' agricultural price and international trade policies. The authors summarize these and realted stylized facts that can be drawn from a new World Bank database that is worthy of the attention of political economy theorists, historians and econometricians. These indicators can be helpful in addressing such questions as the following: where is there still a policy bias against agricultural production? To what extent has there been overshooting in the sense that some developing-country food producers are now being protected from import competition along the lines of the examples of earlier-industrializing Europe and Japan? What are the political economy forces behind the more-successful reformers, and how do they compare with those in less-successful countries where major distortions in agricultural incentives remain? And what explains the pattern of distortions across not only countries but also industries and in the choice of support or tax instruments within the agricultural sector of each country?

This paper outlines the methodological issues associated with the task of measuring that actual delivered direct protection or taxation to individual agricultural industries, as well as the direct protection or anti-protection to non-agricultural sectors. It begins with a guide to what elements in principle could be measured. There are two key purposes of the distortion estimates being generated by this project are: 1) to provide a long annual time series of indicators showing the extent to which price incentives faced by farmers and food consumers have been distorted directly and indirectly by own-government policies in all major developing, transition and high-income countries, and hence for the world as a whole; and 2) to attribute the price distortion estimates for each farm product to specific border or domestic policy measures, so they can serve as inputs into various types of partial and general equilibrium economic models for estimating the effects of those various policies on such things as national and international agricultural markets, farm value added, income inequality, poverty, and national, regional and global welfare.

This article assesses the impact of the world price-depressing effect of agricultural subsidies and border protection in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries on developing economies' exports, imports, and welfare. Developing economy exporters are likely to benefit from reductions in such subsidies and trade barriers, whereas net importers may lose as world prices rise. A simple partial equilibrium model of global trade in commodities that benefit from domestic support or export subsidies is developed to estimate the relevant elasticities. Simulation results suggest that a 50 percent reduction in border protection will have a much larger positive impact on developing economies' exports and welfare than a 50 percent reduction in agricultural subsidies. Although there is significant heterogeneity across developing economies, the results suggest that efforts in the Doha round of World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations should be directed at substantially reducing border protection.

In the last years, the food security issue came to the foreground again, due to the increase of food demand and of prices for raw agricultural products worldwide. Although it is generally considered that the European Union would not have great problems as regards food security from the supply availability point of view, the income gaps and poverty of certain categories of the population may raise problems with regard to the population's access to food and threaten the food security in certain poorer EU member states, among which Romania is most often mentioned. This paper makes an estimation of the food demand system parameters in Romania on the basis of the AIDS (Almost Ideal Demand System) model. This model was used for the analysis of food demand in different countries of the world, both in the developing countries, for the identification of vulnerable population categories from the food security point of view, and in the developed countries in order to know the population's consumption behaviour. The data from the Household Budget Survey from the 1st quarter of the year 2011 have been used. The food demand system parameters are determined for the households from the urban and rural areas. The expenditure elasticities are higher in the rural area than in the urban area mainly due to the rural population's lower cash incomes.