Causes of U.S. Farm Commodity Programs

Interest groups: A survey of empirical models that try to assess their influence

“…32 A positive effect of concentration is found by Esty and Caves (1983), Gardner (1987), Guttman (1980), Zupan (1984), andTrefler (1993). Negative, ambiguous or insignificant effects are reported in Becker (1986), Cahan and Kaempfer (1992), Pincus (1975), Quinn and Shapiro (1991), and Salamon and Siegfried (1977).…”

“…29 See, e.g., Gardner (1987), Guttman (1978), Hunter and Nelson (1989), Kamath (1989), Miller (1991, Pincus (1975), Salamon and Siegfried (1977). penetration are expected to increase an industry's demand for government intervention (Jarrell, 1978;Trefler, 1993). If competitive pressures are high and prices are low, an industry is more likely to vie for protective regulation.…”

“…What also favors the position of producers is that prices of substitutes are high. This appealing argument is brought to the fore by Beghin (1990) and can be 36 See, e.g., Kamath (1989), Trefler (1993), and Stigler (1971), and, Bullock (1992), Congleton and Shugart (1990), Gardner (1987), and Salamon and Siegfried (1977), respectively. See Cahan and Kaempfer (1992) for an insignificant effect.…”

Is Food Security a New Tariff? Explaining Changes in Sanitary and Phytosanitary Regulations by World Trade Organization Members

“…According to these arguments, the richer the country and the fewer the farmers, the lower the organizational costs and free-riding activities. Gardner (1987) finds empirical support for these factors in explaining US farm policy, and Bates (1987) for African agricultural policies. Another puzzling observation that limits the utility of collective action theory is the different regulatory preferences between the United Kingdom (UK) and Germany.…”

Understanding China's grain procurement policy from a perspective of optimization

“…The endogenous theory of economic policy that recognizes policymakers as rational agents maximizing their political preference function subject to political and economic constraints has been widely applied in the study of government intervention in the farm commodity markets (Gardner, 1983(Gardner, , 1987Oehmke and Yao, 1990;Rausser and Foster, 1990;Bullock, 1994). Based on the interactions between the government and various interest groups whose welfare will be affected by the policy concerned, the political preference function is a useful tool to analyze government policies regarding the pricing and trade of grain in the OECD countries including the US, Japan, and Korea (Oehmke and Yao, 1990;Lee and Kennedy, 2006).…”