This paper undertakes three sets of tasks: (i) it analyzes positive and normative aspects of price scissors (the domestic terms of trade between agriculture and industry) within nonsocialist as well as socialist LDCs. The critical role of the economy's institutional features (e.g., external trade environment, wage and income determination, and wage-productivity effects) is emphasized. Certain aspects of the Soviet Industrialization Debate and subsequent collectivization are interpreted, (ii) It develops simple rules to delineate who gains and who loses (within agriculture) from changes in terms of trade, (iii) It presents powerful (and informationally parsimonious) rules for Pareto-improving price reforms for cash crops and agricultural inputs.

We implement a new survey of firms, focusing on their higher-order macroeconomic expectations. The survey provides a novel set of stylized facts regarding the relationship between first-order and higher-order expectations of economic agents, including how they adjust their beliefs in response to a variety of information treatments. We show how these facts can be used to calibrate key parameters of noisy-information models with infinite regress as well as to test predictions made by this class of models. We also consider a range of extensions to the basic noisy-information model that can potentially better reconcile theory and empirics. Although some extensions like level-k thinking are unsuccessful, incorporating heterogeneous long-run priors can address the empirical shortcomings of the basic noisy-information model.