A Billion Dollars a Day The Economics and Politics of Agricultural Subsidies [Hardcover]

• Explores these questions: Why do we have subsidies? How did they evolve? What is the present and possible future of subsidies? What is their impact on a typical African farmer?
  
• Written for the general public, this book will also be useful for courses in Agricultural Policy
  
• Provides a detailed examination of subsidy histories and the current policies of the United States, various European countries, Australia and New Zealand, and Korea and Japan
  
• Includes a discussion of how these policies affect developing countries—examining, in particular, their impact on many African farmers

Preface viii

List of Abbreviations xi

Prologue xiv

1 Introduction: The Problem of Agricultural Subsidies 1

Benin 1

Western Agricultural Subsidies 7

Organization of the Book 13

2 The Economics of Government Intervention 15

Introduction 15

The Invisible Hand 17

Market Failures 21

Violations of the basic conditions: imperfect competition, information, and risk 22

Public goods and externalities 28

Income distribution, poverty, and inequality 33

Conclusion 34

Appendix 2.1: The Theory of the Invisible Hand 35

Appendix 2.2: The Prisoners’ Dilemma 41

3 The Structure of the World Food System 44

Introduction 44

Historical Perspectives 47

The World Fool�A