Both the price control policies and those that aim at regulating food access have been little studied in terms of their intimate relations with the State, its agencies, and its capacity to intervene in the fabric and dynamics of society. In this sense, this paper condenses results of comparing various price control and food access programs, during the 2014-2016 biennium in Egypt, Argentina, Venezuela and the United States. Four countries that, pursuing similar objectives, did so under four different designs: subsidies for products consumed by low-income segments of society (Egypt); agreed-prices for a limited quantity of products (Argentina); frozen prices for the whole economy (Venezuela); and conditional transfers, in the United States. We will argue that in markets of incomplete transitions between moral provision economies and political market economies, price control policies are an integral part of the social pact. An argument that makes state capacities a key element of analysis and forces us to recognize that at some point, its analysis should not only be related to market structures, but is its necessary starting point.
Keywords:
State Capacities, Price System, Price control, Market
Quiroga, J. P. (2019). Between the moral economy of fair value and the political economy of the market price. Journal Studies of Public Policy, 5(2), 42–57. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-6296.2019.55356
Twitter