APPLIED ECONOMICS, TRADE AND AGRICULTURAL POLICY ANALYSIS Acknowledgements

One purpose of this book is to help students in agricultural and forest economics, policymakers in various governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others understand why people lobby in favor of certain public policies, something economists refer to as rent seeking, and the role of economics in analyzing government intervention in these and other situations. [...] In selecting issues for inclusion in this text, three criteria were used: (1) the available literature on applied welfare economics, also referred to as cost-benefit analysis, and issues that might still be considered contentious; (2) the methods used to analyze the implications of trade intervention (which is common in agriculture and forestry); and (3) the application of the tools of applied wel. [...] Given its importance, and since it is the primary subject of the current book, we provide some background information about global agriculture and, in more detail, the agricultural sectors and farm policies of selected countries, including in particular the United States and the European Union, which are the major players on the international agricultural stage. [...] We begin with a surprise: despite a land mass of 3.37 million hectares (ha) and only 1.89 million ha of agricultural land (about 0.46% of that of the United States), The Netherlands is the second-largest exporter by value of agricultural commodities in the world after the U. [...] In particular, we examine the Agreement on Agriculture that was struck upon completion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994 with the formation of the WTO in 1995.