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Abstract
This study relaxes the assumption of perfect and costless policy enforcement found in traditional agricultural policy
analysis and introduces enforcement costs and cheating into the economic analysis of output subsidies. Policy design and
implementation is modeled in this paper as a sequential game between the regulator who decides on the level of intervention,
an enforcement agency that determines the level of policy enforcement, and the farmer who makes the production and cheating
decisions. Analytical results show that farmer compliance is not the natural outcome of self-interest and complete deterrence of
cheating is not economically efficient. The analysis also shows that enforcement costs and cheating change the welfare effects
of output subsidies, the efficiency of the policy instrument in redistributing income, the level of government intervention that
transfers a given surplus to agricultural producers, the socially optimal income redistribution, and the social welfare from
intervention. ©2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.