ABSTRACT
Professor Reca discusses the objectives of price policy from the perspective of planners and bureaucrats and perhaps of the public relations staff of organized political interest groups. Reca lists administered product prices, administered input prices and subsidies, international trade tariffs and quotas, exchange rate policy, marketing boards, and credit subsidies as the main instruments of price policy. Reca devotes the major part of his paper to a discussion of some of the effects of price policies. Reca provides several interesting cases and shows that a price intervention in one commodity can have important effects in other markets because of substitutability and complementarity on both the demand and supply side. Reca points out that virtually every water project ever constructed anywhere in the world underprices water and must be publicly subsidized, attesting further to the importance of the administration and enforcement dimension of price policy instruments.
