Anderson, Kym

Person:
Anderson, Kym

School of Economics, University of Adelaide, Arndt-Corden Dept of Economics, Australian National University, Canberra

Fields of Specialization

Agriculture, Development, International Economics, Resource and Environmental Economics

External Links

Wine Economics Research Centre
Australian National University
University of Adelaide

Departments

School of Economics, University of Adelaide
Arndt-Corden Dept of Economics, Australian National University, Canberra

Last updated: February 1, 2023

Biography

Kym Anderson is the George Gollin Professor of Economics and foundation Executive Director of the Centre for International Economic Studies at the University of Adelaide, where he has been affiliated since 1984. He is also foundation Executive Director of the Wine Economics Research Centre there. Previously he was a Research Fellow in Economics at ANU's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (1977-83), following undergraduate studies at the University of New England in Armidale (1967-70), part-time Masters studies at the University of Adelaide (1971-74) while working in the S.A. Department of Agriculture in Adelaide, and doctoral studies at the University of Chicago and Stanford University (1974-77). In 2012 he rejoined the Australian National University part-time as a Professor of Economics in the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics of ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy. He has spent periods of leave at Korea's International Economics Institute (1979), Korea's Rural Economics Institute (1980-81 as Ford Foundation Visiting Fellow in International Economics), the Australian Department of Trade (1983), Stockholm University's Institute for International Economic Studies (1988), the GATT (now WTO) Secretariat in Geneva (1990-92), and the Research Group of the World Bank in Washington DC (2004-07). Outside Adelaide he has taught as a guest professor at the Australian Defence College, Australian National University, Beijing University, the University of Siena, the University of Sydney, Uppsala University, the World Trade Institute at the Swiss universities of Bern, Fribourg and Neuchatel (Master of International Law and Economics), and Georgetown University's Law School (JD and LLM programs in international economic law). He has conducted many short courses on agricultural and trade policy issues and WTO matters in numerous developing countries including China since 1995. He is a Research Fellow of Europe's London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, a Fellow of the American Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, a Distinguished Fellow (and former President) of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, a Fellow (and Vice-President) of the American Association of Wine Economists, and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is on the editorial board of several international academic journals. He has served on several dispute settlement and arbitration panels at the World Trade Organization since 1996 (the first economist to do so), and on a panel advising the Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Trade in their preparation of Australia's first White Paper on Foreign and Trade Policy (1997). Corporate Board positions include as a non-executive Director of Australia's Grape and Wine R&D Corporation (2000-05), as a Trustee of Adelaide's Institute for International Trade (since 2003), as a Trustee of the Washington DC-based International Food Policy Research Institute (since 2010), and as a Commissioner of the ACIAR Commission of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (since 2011).

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 70

Grain Price Spikes and Beggar-thy-Neighbor Policy Responses: A Global Economywide Analysis
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2017-02) Jensen, Hans G.; Anderson, Kym
When prices spike in international grain markets, national governments often reduce the extent to which that spike affects their domestic food markets. Those actions exacerbate the price spike and international welfare transfer associated with that terms of trade change. Several recent analyses have assessed the extent to which those policies contributed to the 2006–08 international price rises but only by focusing on one commodity or by using a back-of-the envelope (BOTE) method. The present more comprehensive analysis uses a global, economy-wide model that is able to take account of the interactions between markets for farm products that are closely related in production and/or consumption and able to estimate the impacts of those insulating policies on grain prices and on the grain trade and economic welfare of the world's various countries. Our results support the conclusion from earlier studies that there is a need for stronger WTO disciplines on export restrictions.
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?
Political Economy of Public Policies : Insights from Distortions to Agricultural and Food Markets
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-05) Rausser, Gordon; Anderson, Kym; Swinnen, Johan
The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in market distortions and the political-economy explanations that have been advanced. Based on a rich global data set covering a half-century of evidence on commodities, countries, and policy instruments, the paper identifies hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the extent of market distortions and the conditions under which reform may be feasible.
Grain Price Spikes and Beggar-Thy-Neighbor Policy Responses : A Global Economywide Analysis
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-08) Jensen, Hans G; Anderson, Kym
When prices spike in international grain markets, national governments often reduce the extent to which that spike affects their domestic food markets. Those actions exacerbate the price spike and international welfare transfer associated with the terms of trade change. Several recent analyses have assessed the extent to which those policies contributed to the 2006-08 international price rise, but only by focusing on one commodity or using a back-of-the-envelope method. This paper provides a more comprehensive analysis that uses a global economywide model that is able to take account of the interactions between markets for farm products that are closely related in production or consumption. The model is able to estimate the impacts of those insulating policies on grain prices and on the grain trade and economic welfare of various countries. The results support the conclusion from earlier studies that there is a need for stronger World Trade Organization disciplines on export restrictions.
Food Price Spikes, Price Insulation, and Poverty
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-07) Ivanic, Maros; Anderson, Kym; Martin, Will
This paper has two purposes. It first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes -- reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints -- were meant to partially insulate domestic markets from the spike in international prices. The authors find that this insulation added substantially to the spike in international prices for rice, wheat, maize, and oilseeds. As a result, although domestic prices rose less than they would have without insulation in some developing countries, in many other countries they rose more than they would have in the absence of such insulation. The paper's second purpose it to estimate the combined impact of such insulating behavior on poverty in various developing countries and globally. The analysis finds that the actual poverty-reducing impact of insulation is much less than its apparent impact, and that its net effect was to increase global poverty in 2008 by 8 million people, although this increase was not significantly different from zero. Since there are domestic policy instruments, such as conditional cash transfers, that could now provide social protection for the poor far more efficiently and equitably than variations in border restrictions, the authors suggest it is time to seek a multilateral agreement to desist from changing restrictions on trade when international food prices spike.
Agricultural Price Distortions, Inequality, and Poverty
(World Bank, 2010) Cockburn, John; Anderson, Kym; Martin, Will
For decades, the earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed because of a pro-urban, anti-agricultural bias in own-country policies and because governments in more well off countries are favoring their farmers by imposing import barriers and providing subsidies. These policies have reduced national and global economic welfare, inhibited economic growth, and added to inequality and poverty because no less than three-quarters of the billion poorest people in the world have been dependent directly or indirectly on farming for their livelihoods (World Bank 2007). The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to outline the analytical framework and the common empirical methodology adopted in the global and national case studies reported in subsequent chapters, to summarize and compare the modeling results from the global and national models, and to draw some general policy implications. The findings are based on three chapters (part two) that each use a global model to examine the effects of farm and nonfarm price and trade policies on global poverty and the distribution of poverty within and across many of the countries identified, plus ten individual developing-country studies (parts three-five) spanning the three key regions: Asia (where nearly two-thirds of the world's poor live), Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.
Distortions to Agriculture and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-09) Anderson, Kym; Brückner, Markus
To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa's slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy induced distortions to relative agricultural prices to address this question econometrically. First, the authors test if these policy distortions respond to economic growth, using rainfall and international commodity price shocks as instrumental variables. They find that on impact there is no significant response of relative agricultural price distortions to changes in real GDP per capita growth. Then, the authors test the reverse proposition and find a statistically significant and sizable negative effect of relative agricultural price distortions on the growth rate of Sub-Saharan African countries. The fixed effects estimates yield that, during the 1960-2005 period, a ten percentage points increase in distortions to relative agricultural prices decreased the region's real GDP per capita growth rate by about half a percentage point per annum.
Export Restrictions and Price Insulation during Commodity Price Booms
(2011-05-01) Martin, Will; Anderson, Kym
For individual countries, variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices. If this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market, its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility. This study shows the nature of the resulting collective action problem, with the policy being ineffective on average in stabilizing domestic prices while increasing the volatility of the income transfers from terms-of-trade changes. A simple approach to assessing the contribution of insulation to the price increases is developed and used with new estimates of agricultural distortions to assess its contribution to the price spikes in 1972-74 and 2006-08 for rice and wheat. The analysis suggests that 45 percent of the increase in rice prices in 2006-08, and 30 percent of the increase in wheat prices, was due to insulating behavior. One sign of progress since 1972-74 was a substantial reduction in the extent of price-insulating behavior by the industrial countries. This provides little stabilizing benefit in the rice market because countries not classifying themselves at the World Trade Organization as developing account for only 3 percent of world rice consumption. But it does offer some benefit for the wheat market where non-developing countries account for 27 percent of consumption.
Agricultural Distortions in Sub-Saharan Africa : Trade and Welfare Indicators, 1961 to 2004
(World Bank, 2011-05-31) Croser, Johanna L.; Anderson, Kym
For decades, agricultural price and trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa hampered farmers' contributions to economic growth and poverty reduction. This paper draws on a modification of so-called trade restrictiveness indexes to provide theoretically precise partial-equilibrium indicators of the trade and welfare effects of agricultural policy distortions to producer and consumer prices in 19 African countries since 1961. Annual time series estimates are provided not only by country but also, for the region, by commodity and by policy instrument. The findings reveal the considerable extent of policy reform over the past two decades, especially through reducing export taxation; but they also reveal that national policies continue to reduce trade and economic welfare much more in Sub-Saharan Africa than in Asia or Latin America.
Would Freeing Up World Trade Reduce Poverty and Inequality? The Vexed Role of Agricultural Distortions
(2011-03-01) Cockburn, John; Anderson, Kym; Martin, Will
Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but worsen others, so the net effects are unclear without empirical modeling. This paper summarizes a series of new economy-wide global and national empirical studies that focus on the net effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade on poverty and inequality globally and in various developing countries. The global LINKAGE model results suggest that removing those remaining distortions would reduce international inequality, largely by boosting net farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries, and would reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 percent. The analysis based on the Global Trade Analysis Project model for a sample of 15 countries, and nine stand-alone national case studies, all point to larger reductions in poverty, especially if only the non-poor are subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue.