Synopses & Reviews
The prices of farm products are crucial determinants of the extent of poverty and inequality in the world.The vast majority of the world 's poorest households depend to a considerable extent on farming for their incomes, while food represents a large component of the consumption of all poor households. For generations, food prices have been heavily distorted by government policies in high-income and developing countries. Many countries began to reform their agricultural price and trade policies in the 1980s, but government policy intervention is still considerable and still favors farmers in high-income countries at the expense of many farmers in developing countries.What would be the poverty and inequality consequences of the removal of the remaining distortions to agricultural incentives? This question is of great relevance to governments in evaluating ways to engage in multilateral and regional trade negotiations or to improve their own policies unilaterally. 'Agricultural Price Distortions, Inequality, and Poverty' analyzes the effects of agricultural and trade policies around the world on national and regional economic welfare, on income inequality among and within countries, and on the level and incidence of poverty in developing countries. The studies include economy-wide analyses of the inequality and poverty effects of own-country policies compared with rest-of-the-world policies for 10 individual developing countries in three continents. This book also includes three chapters that each use a separate global economic model to examine the effects of policies on aggregate poverty and the distribution of poverty across many identified developing countries.This study is motivated by two policy issues: first, the World Trade Organization 's struggle to conclude the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations, in which agricultural policy reform is, again, one of the most contentious topics in the talks and, second, the struggle of the developing countries to achieve their Millennium Development Goals by 2015 notably the alleviation of hunger and poverty which depends crucially on policies that affect agricultural incentives.
Synopsis
This book brings together global and national empirical studies that estimate the effects of policies that distort the world's agricultural markets and other trade on poverty and inequality globally, and in various developing countries.
Synopsis
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, and in ways that reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but worsen others, so the net effects are unclear without empirical modeling.Using a new set of estimates of agricultural price distortions, this book brings together economy-wide global and national empirical studies that focus on the net effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade on poverty and inequality globally and in various developing countries. The global LINKAGE model results suggest that removing remaining distortions would reduce international inequality, largely by boosting net farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries, and would reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 percent.The analysis based on the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model for a sample of 15 countries, and ten stand-alone national case studies from three continents, suggest even larger reductions in poverty. This is especially so if only the non-poor are subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue. The volume draws out the implications for policy reforms in developing countries, pointing to ways in which complementary domestic policies can increase the likelihood that freeing markets for farm products and other goods would reduce both poverty and inequality.