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...

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in de/veloping 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...

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...

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...

Most of the world's poorest people depend on farming for their livelihood. Earnings from farming in low-income countries are depressed partly due to a pro-urban bias in own-country policies, and partly because richer countries (including some developing countries) favor their farmers with import...

The authors illustrate some of the potential consequences of the World Trade Organization's Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations on incomes and poverty globally. Using the global LINKAGE model to generate changes in domestic and international prices that have a direct impact on factor...

In 1990, Australia and New Zealand were ranked around 25th and 37th in terms of Gross National Product (GNP) per capita, having been the highest-income countries in the world one hundred years earlier. Those countries relatively poor economic growth performance over that long period contrasts...

This chapter begins with a brief summary of economic growth and structural changes in the region since the 1950s and of agricultural and other economic policies as they affected agriculture before and after the various reforms, and in several cases fundamental regime changes, of the past...