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...

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...

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...

This paper analyzes the economic effects of agricultural price and merchandise trade policies around the world as of 2004 on global markets, net farm incomes, and national and regional economic welfare and poverty, using the global economy wide Linkage model, new estimates of agricultural price...

The global database developed as an integral part of the World Bank's research project on Distortions to Agricultural Incentives, which is publicly available, provides around 30,000 estimates of nominal rates assistance to agricultural industries (NRAs) and associated consumer tax equivalents...

The regional books that provided detailed estimates of distortion in developing economies are all country focused. While they include commodity details for their particular country, they are not able to provide an overview for developing countries or high-income countries as a group, or for the...