[The existence of pollution externalities calls for government intervention in developing policy measures that will improve social welfare. This paper suggests a method to predict and compare the short-run aggregate output, pollution, and labor input of a competitive industry facing various environmental policies. Assuming that the choice between alternative production technologies can only take place prior to the investment decision, the labor output ratios and the pollution output ratios are fixed in the short run but vary among plants; their distribution is the information used in the aggregation procedure. The performance of different environmental policies--taxes and standards--is examined and compared.]

I. The model 140.—II. Marginal effects of taxes and subsidies, 142.—III. The role of risk preferences, 143.—IV. Relative effectiveness of taxes and subsidies, 145.—V. Conclusions, 147.

I. Introduction, 625.—II. Model I—the case of positive social costs of pollution at the urban center when natural absorption exists, 627.—III. Model II—the case of pollution externality in production, 633.—IV. Concluding remarks: integration of the two models, 637.

This paper introduces a decision framework for regulating environmental health risks which incorporates the characteristic uncertainty about the dissemination and toxicological impacts of environmental contaminants and the behavioral restrictions commonly encountered. Analysis indicates that increases in uncontrollable uncertainty will increase emphasis on average performance, that more potent or less controllable risks will be regulated more stringently and that increasing aversion to uncertainty may result in poorer average performance. The paper also develops an alternative measure for valuing risk of loss of life taking into account uncertainty about health risk generation processes.

Agri-food value chains (AVCs) intermediate the flow of products between largely rural farmers, fisherfolk, or herders and increasingly urban consumers. The theoretical models that historically structured research on the economic development process assumed away AVC functions, however, and AVC firms and workers were necessarily omitted from the household data that generated most empirical findings in the agricultural and development economics literatures. As a result, the discipline has somewhat overlooked the rapid growth and structural change in AVCs over the past few decades that turned AVCs into major employers and sources of value addition, as well as key loci for technology transfer and foreign investment. This paper offers an integrated, structured, empirical narrative of how and why AVC revolutions occur in developing countries, the impacts of those changes, and the abundant economic research opportunities these structural changes afford economists. (JEL L14, L81, O13, O33, Q12, Q13, Q17)

The food commodity price boom of 2003–2008 was the most notable in the past several decades, having a substantial impact on global economic activity. It affected developing nations by impacting real output, the balance of payments, government budgetary positions and, most important, the well being of the very poor. High commodity prices also affected developed countries, by transmitting business cycle disturbances and creating inflationary pressures. Several recent studies tried to identify and quantify the factors that caused the food commodity price boom of 2003–2008 (see, for instance, Isabel Vansteenkiste 2009). These studies suggest that one key factor is growth in demand, which, since the 1980s, has outpaced growth in supply. Other studies argued that biofuel is the culprit, since it increases demand for staple crops (see, for instance, Donald Mitchell 2008). All these studies, however, assumed competitive markets and did not consider the impact of biofuel on energy costs to farmers. Moreover, they ignored the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). These studies leave us perplexed regarding the true impact of biofuel on food commodity prices— was it or was it not an important contributor to the recent food commodity boom? We believe that to answer this question, the interactions between energy and food must be modeled and OPEC introduced, and the impact of biofuels compared with other factors that are argued by the literature to be important. This paper aims to analyze the multiple contributions of energy and biofuels to the increase Are Biofuels the Culprit? OPEC, Food, and Fuel