Economic Logic

In the best of all worlds, improvements in agriculture productivity leads to surpluses that allow capital accumulation and the development ...

In some developing economies, cattle are used as store of value. This is because there is no other good asset available as financial markets...

When I am thinking about Scotland and the average diet of its residents, I am not thinking about fresh fruit. Indeed, obesity rates there ar...

While most industrialized economies are strong advocates for free trade, they somehow manage to make an exception for the agricultural secto...

Many countries have some sort of rationing system in place for their dairy industry, because apparently farmers have a tendency to produce t...

When the Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded in 2010 and polluted much of the Gulf of Mexico Coast, some of the loudest complaints came ...

Policy advice and intervention in the poorest developing economies are all about agricultural policy. How to increase crop yields, how to se...

Whenever you are facing a risk, you want to be able to hedge against it (at least if you are risk averse). For this, there are all sorts of ...

The great thing about the Internet is that one can discover unexpected uses of familiar techniques. Or one can search for new applications w...

Growth theory and data teach us that, at least in developed countries, economies tend to converge in the long run: the dispersion across reg...

Food is a substantial part of household expenses in developing economies, and in many of the latter foreign aid and remittances from emigran...

I find it fascinating that there is also plenty of Economics in the animal kingdom. Two recent papers about bees just caught my attention. A...

Pollution regulation is typically cast as a game between citizens and firms, the first suffering the consequences of pollution while the sec...

Ina relatively short time, biofuels have become remarkably popular, especially as an additive to regular petroleum based fuel. This is at l...

Switzerland has had for centuries a rather unique system of communal land tenure for the alpine areas. Indeed, cattle owners send their live...

When you think about income differences across the world, Africa is really depressing. It seems nothing is making a lasting impact in terms ...

US colleges make big money from the sale of all sorts of items imprinted with their logo, in particular clothes. Of course, to maximize the ...

When one faces fluctuations in income, it seems quite natural to find some way to insure yourself. For farmers, price fluctuations can be a ...

Why are Japanese farms so small and so inefficient/ As usual under such circumstances, this is because they are protected through subsidies ...

With increasing frequency, it is proposed that restaurants should post on their menus nutritional information. The restaurants resist this b...