Over the past two decades, earnings from farming in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia have been altered hugely by government sectoral and trade policy reforms. This paper summarizes evidence on the changing extent of distortions to markets for farm products since...

For decades, trade between countries in agricultural products has been distorted by policies of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Agricultural trade has often also been limited by an anti-agricultural, pro-urban bias in many developing country policies....

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...

A decline in governmental distortions to agricultural and other trade since the 1980s has contributed to economic growth and poverty alleviation globally. But new modeling results suggest that has taken the world only three-fifths of the way towards freeing merchandise trade, and that farm...

Despite recent reforms, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of agricultural and food price distortions such as producer and consumer support estimates (PSEs and CSEs) can be poor guides to the policiesÂ’ trade effects. Two recent...

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...

This paper summarizes a new database that sheds light on the impact of trade-related policy developments over the past half century on distortions to agricultural incentives and thus also to consumer prices for food in 75 countries spanning the per capita income spectrum. Price-support policies...

Agricultural biotechnologies, and especially transgenic crops, have the potential to boost food security in developing countries by offering higher incomes for farmers and lower-priced and better quality food for consumers. That potential is being heavily compromised, however, because the...

For decades, agricultural price and trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa hampered farmersÂ’ contributions to economic growth and poverty reduction. While there has been much policy reform over the past two decades, the injections of agricultural development funding, together with on-going...

For decades the worldÂ’s agricultural markets have been highly distorted by government policies, but differently for different commodities such that a ranking of weighted average nominal rates of assistance across countries can be misleading as an indicator of the trade or welfare effects of...