Publication: Welfare- and Trade-Based Indicators of National Distortions to Agricultural Incentives
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2009-03
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2017-09-07
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Despite reforms over the past quarter-century, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of those price distortions such as the nominal rate of assistance and consumer tax equivalent provide measures of the degree of intervention, but they can be misleading as indicators of the true effects of those policies. By drawing on recent theoretical literature that provides indicators of the trade- and welfare-reducing effects of price and trade policies, this paper develops more-satisfactory indexes for capturing distortions to agricultural incentives. It then exploits the agricultural distortion database recently compiled by the World Bank to generate estimates of them for both developing and high-income countries over the past half century, based on a sample of 75 countries that together account for all but one-tenth of the world's population, gross domestic product (GDP) and agricultural production. While they are still only partial equilibrium measures, they provide a much better approximation of the true trade and welfare effects of sectoral policies without needing a formal model of global markets or even price elasticity estimates.
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“Lloyd, Peter J.; Croser, Johanna L.; Anderson, Kym. 2009. Welfare- and Trade-Based Indicators of National Distortions to Agricultural Incentives. Agricultural Distortions Working Paper;72. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/28180 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Traditional weighted average aggregates of the price distortions involved, such as producer and consumer support estimates can be poor indicators of the trade restrictiveness and economic welfare losses associated with them, especially if a country's support estimates vary a lot across the product range. Certainly estimates of trade and welfare effects of price supports can be obtained from sector or economy-wide models using price elasticity estimates, but the results can be contentious if there is no consensus on what model specification and elasticity parameters to use. This paper shows that, if there is a willingness to accept simple assumptions about elasticities, it is possible to generate indicators of the welfare and trade restrictiveness of agricultural policies using no more than the price and quantity data needed to generate producer and consumer support estimates. These new indexes thus provide an attractive supplement to the current policy monitoring regime developed by the OECD Secretariat.Publication Changing Contributions of Different Agricultural Policy Instruments to Global Reductions in Trade and Welfare(2010-06-01)Trade negotiators and policy advisors are keen to know the relative contribution of different farm policy instruments to international trade and economic welfare. Nominal rates of assistance or producer support estimates are incomplete indicators, especially when (especially in developing countries) some commodities are taxed and others are subsidized, in which case positive contributions can offset negative contributions. This paper develops and estimates a new set of more-satisfactory indicators to examine the relative contribution of different farm policy instruments to reductions in agricultural trade and welfare, drawing on recent literature on trade restrictiveness indexes and a recently compiled database on distortions to agricultural prices for 75 developing and high-income countries over the period 1960 to 2004. Results confirm earlier findings that border taxes are the dominant instrument affecting global trade and welfare, but they also suggest declines in export taxes contributed nearly as much as cuts in import protection to global welfare gains from agricultural policy reforms since the 1980s.Publication Five Decades of Distortions to Agricultural Incentives(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-03)This chapter begins with a brief summary of the long history of national distortions to agricultural markets. It then outlines the methodology used to generate annual indicators of the extent of government interventions in markets, details of which are provided in Anderson and appendix A. A description of the economies under study and their economic growth and structural changes over recent decades is then briefly presented as a preface to the main section of the chapter, in which the nominal rates of assistance and consumer tax equivalents (NRA and CTE) estimates are summarized across regions and over the decades since the 1950s. These estimates are discussed in far more detail in the regional chapters that follow. A summary is also provided of an additional set of indicators of agricultural price distortions presented in chapter eleven that are based on the trade restrictiveness index first developed by Anderson and Neary (2005). In chapter twelve the focus shifts from countries to commodities, and all the various distortion indicators are used to provide a sense of how distorted are each of the key farm commodity markets globally. Then chapter thirteen uses the study's NRA and CTE estimates to provide a new set of results from a global economy-wide model that attempts to quantify the impacts on global markets, net farm incomes and welfare of the reforms since the early 1980s and of the policies still in place as of 2004. The chapter concludes by drawing on the lessons learned to speculate on the prospects for further reducing the disarray in world agricultural markets.
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