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Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Africa
(World Bank, 2009) Masters, William A.; Anderson, Kym
One of every two people in Sub-Saharan Africa survives on less than $1.25 a day. That proportion has changed little over the past three decades, unlike in Asia and elsewhere, so the region's share of global poverty has risen from one-tenth to almost one-third since 1980. About 70 percent of today's 400 million poor Africans live in rural areas and depend directly or indirectly on farming for their livelihoods. While that rural share was even higher in the past, it means policies affecting the incentives for farmers to produce and sell farm products remain a major influence on the extent of Africa's poverty. The case studies help address questions such as the following: where is there still a policy bias against agricultural production? To what extent are some farmers now being protected from import competition? What are the political economic forces behind the more-successful reformers, and how do they compare with those in less-successful countries where major distortions in agricultural incentives remain? How important have domestic political forces been in bringing about reform, as compared with international forces? What explains the cross commodity pattern of distortions within the agricultural sector of each country? What policy lessons and trade implications can be drawn from these differing experiences with a view to ensuring better growth-enhancing and poverty-reducing outcomes in the study's focus countries and in the region's other economies?
Services Trade and Development : The Experience of Zambia
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Mattoo, Aaditya; Payton, Lucy
Some see trade in services as irrelevant to the development agenda for least developed countries (LDCs). Others see few benefits from past market openings by LDCs. This book debunks both views. It finds that serious imperfections in Zambia's reform of services trade deprived the country of significant benefits and diminished faith in liberalization.
Poverty and the WTO : Impacts of the Doha Development Agenda
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) Hertel, Thomas W.; Winters, L. Alan; Hertel, Thomas W.; Winters, L. Alan
This study reports on the findings from a major international research project investigating the poverty impacts of a potential Doha Development Agenda (DDA). It combines in a novel way the results from several strands of research. First, it draws on an intensive analysis of the DDA Framework Agreement, with particularly close attention paid to potential reforms in agriculture. The scenarios are built up using newly available tariff line data, and their implications for world markets are established using a global modeling framework. These world trade impacts form the basis for 12 country case studies of the national poverty impacts of these DDA scenarios. The focus countries are Bangladesh, Brazil (2 studies), Cameroon, China (2 studies), Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, and Zambia. Although the diversity of approaches taken in these studies limits the ability to draw broader conclusions, an additional study that provides a 15-country cross-section analysis is aimed at this objective. Finally, a global analysis provides estimates for the world as a whole.