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"Food and food markets still enjoy a pivotal role in the world economy and the international food industry is moving towards greater consolidation and globalization, with increased vertical integration and changes to market structure. Companies grow bigger in order to obtain economies of scale and issues and such as food security, quality, obesity and health are ever important factors. This textbook analyzes the structure of the world's food economy, with particularly strong coverage on the root causes of periodic food crises and the impact of WTO measures and other agricultural policies. Bio-energy, cooperatives, regional trading blocs and liberalization are all placed under the microscope. The result is an internationally focused account of the role of food markets today with history and future trends and prospects analyzed alongside contemporary issues"--

The Move to the Market? brings together recent contributions that critically review and examine the role that trade and industry policy reforms have played in the transitional economies. It relates trade and industry policy to the wider set of reforms being implemented as part of the process of moving from a predominantly centrally planned to a more market-oriented economy. The book highlights the different and complex patterns of development that are emerging between the transitional economies of Europe, Africa and Asia.

This authoritative book on China's oil demand and government policies and practices rests on two essential foundations: first and foremost on the author's considerable knowledge of China's oil situation and prospects, together with his access to Chinese energy literature and data; and secondly, on that insight afforded to him and, therefore, his readers from his fluency in Chinese. The author analyzes the Chinese oil market and the rising pressure on Beijing to reform policies which constrain China's ability to meet soaring demand and to pay for crucial imports at a time of growing political and economic uncertainties. Dr Wang acknowledges the importance of China meeting its growing domestic oil demand, if at all possible, through national production. The sheer weight of China's population, and its burgeoning requirements as industrialization spreads into most regions, dwarfs the needs of others and places unprecedented strain on international oil trades. The author stresses the fact that the outcome is hard to define, yet the time required to tackle the nation's energy needs is not limitless. Moreover, he reminds the reader of the perennial difficulty in meeting widely disparate economic and energy needs in different regions of the vast country

Much research has been devoted to the consequences of the completion of the European internal market in 1992. Existing estimates of the effects of market integration remain exploratory, however, and many important issues have yet to be adequately addressed. These are the issues concerning this book. Edited by L. Alan Winters and Anthony Venables, the volume examines such questions as the extent of gains to be expected from both 'internal' and 'external' economies of scale following integration, the implications of 1992 for the European Community's trade with its traditional EFTA partners, the potentially valuable new East European markets, and the rest of the world. There are also chapters considering the implications of the internal market for the design of appropriate technology and taxation policies, and a study of the role of Japanese foreign direct investment in European manufacturing

"A primary function of trade policy is to restrict imports to benefit the targeted domestic sector. However, a well-established theoretical literature highlights that the form of trade policy (e.g., quotas versus tariffs) can have a significant impact on how much trade policy affects firms' abilities to price above marginal cost (i.e., market power). The US steel industry provides an excellent example to study these issues, as it has received many different types of trade protection over the past decades. We model the US steel market and then use a panel of data on major steel products from 1980 through 2006 to examine the effects of various trade policies on the steel market. We find that the US steel market is very competitive throughout our sample with the exception of the period in which they received comprehensive voluntary restraint agreements (i.e., quotas) and were able to price substantially above marginal cost. All other forms of protection were in tariff form and had little effect on market power, consistent with prior theoretical literature on the nonequivalence of tariffs and quotas. We also find evidence that market power eroded over time in steel products where mini-mill producers gained sizeable market share, highlighting the role of technology in the market as well"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site