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. Especially in developing...

Australia's lackluster economic growth performance in the first four decades following World War II was in part due to an anti-trade, anti-primary sector bias in government assistance policies. This paper provides new annual estimates of the extent of those biases since 1946 and their gradual...

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...

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 can be poor indicators of the trade restrictiveness and economic welfare...

National barriers to trade are often varied to insulate domestic markets from international price variability, especially following a sudden spike. This paper explores the extent of that behavior by governments in the case of agricultural products, particularly food staples whose prices have...

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...

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...

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...

A study of distortions to agricultural incentives in 18 developing countries during 1960-84, by Krueger, Schiff and Valdes (1988; 1991), found that policies in most of those developing countries were directly or indirectly harming their farmers. Since the mid-1980s there has been a substantial...

Food prices in international markets spiked upward in 2008, doubling or more in a matter of months. Evidence is still being compiled on policy responses over the following two years, but lessons can be learned from the price spike in 1973, the magnitude and speed of which were similar to those...