Notwithstanding the tariffication component of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, import tariffs on farm products continue to provide an incomplete indication of the extent to which agricultural producer and consumer incentives are distorted in national markets. As well, in developing...

Agricultural markets in OECD countries have long been highly distorted by government policies. Traditional weighted average aggregates of the price distortions involved, such as producer and consumer support estimates (PSEs and CSEs), can be poor indicators of the trade restrictiveness and...

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...

For decades, agricultural price and trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa hampered farmers’ 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...

Despite recent reforms, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of those price distortions can be poor guides to the policies’ economic effects. Recent theoretical literature provides indicators of trade- and welfare-reducing effects of...

For decades the world’s agricultural markets have been highly distorted by national government policies, but very differently for different commodities. Hence a weighted average across countries of nominal rates of assistance or consumer tax equivalents for a product can be misleading as an...

National barriers to trade are often varied to insulate domestic markets from international price variability. This paper explores the extent of that behavior by governments using estimates of agricultural price distortions in 75 countries. Newly estimated price transmission elasticities are...

The recent upward spike in the international price of food led some countries to raise export barriers. As in previous price spike periods, that response by some food-exporting countries was accompanied by a lowering of import restrictions by numerous food-importing countries. Both actions...

The claim by global trade modelers that the potential contribution to global economic welfare of removing agricultural subsidies is less than one-tenth of that from removing agricultural tariffs puzzles many observers. To help explain that result, this paper first compares the OECD and...

This paper provides estimates of the economic impact of initial adoption of genetically modified (GM) cotton and of its potential impacts beyond the few countries where it is currently common. Use is made of the latest version of the GTAP database and model. Our results suggest that by following...