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).

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 70

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.
Genetically Modified Rice Adoption: Implications for Welfare and Poverty Alleviation

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-08) Anderson, Kym ; Jackson, Lee Ann ; Nielsen, Chantal Pohl

The first generation of genetically modified (GM) crop varieties sought to increase producer profitability through cost reductions or higher yields, while the next generation of GM food research is focusing on breeding for attributes of interest to consumers. Golden Rice, for example, has been genetically engineered to contain a higher level of vitamin A and thereby boost the health of poor people in developing countries. This paper analyzes the potential economic effects of adopting both types of innovation in Asia, including its impact on rice producers and consumers. It does so using the global economy-wide computable general equilibrium model known as GTAP. The results suggest the farm productivity gains could be dwarfed by the welfare gains resulting from the potential health-enhancing attributes of golden rice, which would boost the productivity of unskilled workers among Asia's poor.
The Challenge of Reducing Subsidies and Trade Barriers

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-09) Anderson, Kym

This is one of 10 studies for the Copenhagen Consensus Project that sought to evaluate the most feasible opportunities to improve welfare globally and alleviate poverty in developing countries. The author argues that phasing out distortionary government subsidies and barriers to international trade will yield an extraordinarily high benefit-cost ratio. A survey is provided of recent estimates using global economy-wide simulation models of the benefits of doing that by way of the current Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations. Even if adjustment costs are several times as large as suggested by available estimates, the benefit-cost ratio from seizing this opportunity exceeds 20. That is much higher than the rewards from regional or bilateral trade agreements or from providing preferential access for least-developed countries' exports to high-income countries. Such reform would simultaneously contribute to alleviating several of the other key challenges reflected in the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals.
Food Price Spikes, Price Insulation, and Poverty

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-07) Anderson, Kym ; Ivanic, Maros ; 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 Trade Reform and Poverty Reduction in Developing Countries

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-09) Anderson, Kym

The author offers an economic assessment of the opportunities and challenges provided by the World Trade Organization's Doha Development Agenda, particularly through agricultural trade liberalization, for low-income countries seeking to trade their way out of poverty. After discussing links between poverty, economic growth, and trade, he reports modeling results showing that farm product markets remain the most costly of all goods market distortions in world trade. The author focuses on what such reform might mean for developing countries both with and without their involvement in the multilateral trade negotiations. What becomes clear is that if those countries want to maximize their benefits from the Doha round, they need also to free up their own domestic product and factor markets so their farmers are better able to take advantage of new market opportunities abroad. The author also addresses other concerns of low-income countries about farm trade reform: whether there would be losses associated with tariff preference erosion, whether food-importing countries would suffer from higher food prices in international markets, whether China's WTO accession will provide an example of trade reform aggravating poverty by way of cuts in prices received by Chinese farmers, and the impact on food security and poverty alleviation.
Trade, Standards, and the Political Economy of Genetically Modified Food

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-09-01) Anderson, Kym ; Damania, Richard ; Jackson, Lee Ann

A common-agency lobbying model is developed to help understand why North America and the European Union have adopted such different policies toward genetically modified (GM) food. Results show that when firms (in this case farmers) lobby policy makers to influence standards and consumers and environmentalists care about the choice of standard, it is possible that increased competition from abroad can lead to strategic incentives to raise standards, not just lower them as shown in earlier models. We show that differences in comparative advantage in the adoption of GM crops may be sufficient to explain the trans-Atlantic difference in GM policies. On the one hand, farmers in a country with a comparative advantage in GM technology can gain a strategic cost advantage by lobbying for lax controls on GM production and usage at home and abroad. On the other hand, when faced with greater competition, the optimal response of farmers in countries with a comparative disadvantage in GM adoption may be to lobby for more-stringent GM standards. Thus it is rational for producers in the EU (whose relatively small farms would enjoy less gains from the new biotechnology than broad-acre American farms) to reject GM technologies if that enables them and/or consumer and environmental lobbyists to argue for restraints on imports from GM-adopting countries. This theoretical proposition is supported by numerical results from a global general equilibrium model of GM adoption in America without and with an EU moratorium.
Implications of Genetically Modified Food Technology Policies for Sub-Saharan Africa

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-09) Anderson, Kym ; Jackson, Lee Ann

The first generation of genetically modified (GM) crop varieties sought to increase farmer profitability through cost reductions or higher yields. The next generation of GM food research is focusing also on breeding for attributes of interest to consumers, beginning with "golden rice," which has been genetically engineered to contain a higher level of vitamin A and thereby boost the health of unskilled laborers in developing countries. The authors analyze empirically the potential economic effects of adopting both types of innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). They do so using the global economy-wide computable general equilibrium model known as GTAP. The results suggest that the welfare gains are potentially very large, especially from nutritionally enhanced GM wheat and rice, and that-contrary to the claims of numerous interests-those estimated benefits are diminished only slightly by the presence of the European Union's current barriers to imports of GM foods. In particular, if SSA countries impose bans on GM crop imports in an attempt to maintain access to EU markets for non-GM products, the loss to domestic consumers due to that protectionism boost to SSA farmers is far more than the small economic gain for these farmers from greater market access to the EU.
Doha Merchandise Trade Reform : What is at Stake for Developing Countries?

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2006-05-01) Anderson, Kym ; Martin, Will ; van der Mensbrugghe, Dominique

This article: a) summarizes the costs of current merchandise trade distortions to developing and other economies; b) examines some scenarios that might emerge as part of an eventual Doha agreement consistent with the 2005 Hong Kong Ministerial declaration, particularly with respect to agriculture; and c) draws implications for the strategies developing countries might adopt in the World Trade Organization's (WTO's) Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations. This article estimates what the world economy might look like in 2015 without and with a successful conclusion to the Doha round, how far Doha could take the world toward an outcome with no distortions in merchandise trade, and what contribution various elements of a Doha package could make.
Long-Run Impacts of China's WTO Accession on Farm-Nonfarm Income Inequality and Rural Poverty

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-05) Anderson, Kym ; Huang, Jikun ; Ianchovichina, Elena

Many fear China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will impoverish its rural people by way of greater import competition in its agricultural markets. Anderson, Huang, and Ianchovichina explore that possibility bearing in mind that, even if producer prices of some (land-intensive) farm products fall, prices of other (labor-intensive) farm products could rise. Also, the removal of restrictions on exports of textiles and clothing could boost town and village enterprises, so demand for unskilled labor for nonfarm work in rural areas may grow even if demand for farm labor in aggregate falls. New estimates, from the global economywide numerical simulation model known as GTAP, of the likely changes in agricultural and other product prices as a result of WTO accession are drawn on to examine empirically the factor reward implications of China's WTO accession. The results suggest farm-nonfarm and Western-Eastern income inequality may well rise in China but rural-urban income inequality need not. The authors conclude with some policy suggestions for alleviating any pockets of farm household poverty that may emerge as a result of WTO accession.
The Challenge of Reducing International Trade and Migration Barriers

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-04) Anderson, Kym ; Winters, L. Alan

While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly harmful to the world's poorest people, as are barriers to worker migration across borders. This paper focuses on how costly those anti-poor trade policies are, and examines possible strategies to reduce remaining distortions. Two opportunities in particular are addressed: completing the Doha Development Agenda process at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and freeing up the international movement of workers. A review of the economic benefits and adjustment costs associated with these opportunities provides the foundation to undertake benefit/cost analysis required to rank this set of opportunities against those aimed at addressing the world's other key challenges as part of the Copenhagen Consensus project. The paper concludes with key caveats and suggests that taking up these opportunities could generate huge social benefit/cost ratios that are considerably higher than the direct economic ones quantified in this study, even without factoring in their contribution to alleviating several of the other challenges identified by that project, including malnutrition, disease, poor education and air pollution.