Abstract
Food and agriculture have been subject to heavy-handed government interventions throughout much of the history and across the globe, both in developing and in developed countries. Today more than 500 billion (half a trillion) US dollars are spent by some governments to support farmers while at the same time some governments impose regulations and taxes that hurt farmers. Political considerations are crucial to understand these policies since almost all agricultural and food policies have redistributive effects and are therefore subject to lobbying and pressure from interest groups and used by decision-makers to influence society for both economic and political reasons.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Wi kipedia and The Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, political economy originated in moral philosophy. It was developed in the eighteenth century as the study of the economies of states, or polities, hence the term political economy. Originally, political economy meant the study of the conditions under which production or consumption within limited parameters was organized in nation-states. In that way, political economy expanded the emphasis of economics, which comes from the Greek oikos (meaning “home”) and nomos (meaning “law” or “order”). Thus, political economy was meant to express the laws of production of wealth at the state level, just as economics was the ordering of the home. The French physiocrats, along with Adam Smith , John Stuart Mill , David Ricardo , Henry George , Thomas Malthus , and Karl Marx were some of the exponents of political economy. In the late nineteenth century, the term economics came to replace political economy, coinciding with the publication of Principles of Economics , an influential textbook b y Alfred Marshall (1890). Ea rlier, Jevons (1879), a proponent of mathematical methods applied to the subject, advocated economics for brevity and with the hope of the term becoming the recognized name of science, despite calling his book The Theory of Political Economy . In fact, one of the oldest and most prestigious economics journals today is the Journal of Political Economy, which “has since 1892 presented significant research and scholarship in economic theory and practice (JPE website).
- 2.
A survey of this literature is i n de Gorter and Swinnen (2002).
- 3.
In this book I will not attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the general literature. I refer to Rausser et al. (2011) who identify broadly six “schools” in the political economy literature. Other relatively recent surveys of the political-economic literatu re inc lude Dewan and Shepsle (2008a, b), Mueller (2003), a nd Weingast and Whitman (2006). M o re specific reviews are: for trade po li cy Grossman and Helpman (2001, 2002) and Rodrik (1995); for fiscal and monetary p olicy Persson and Tabellini (2000); f or the relationship between governance structures and fiscal and growth-promoti ng poli cies Persson and Tabellini (2003).
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Swinnen, J. (2018). Introduction. In: The Political Economy of Agricultural and Food Policies. Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50102-8_1
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