Agricultural Price Distortions, Inequality, and Poverty

Kym Anderson, John Cockburn, Will Martin

• Publisher: World Bank
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780821381847
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For decades, the earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed because of a pro-urban, anti-agricultural bias in own-country policies and because governments in more well off countries are favoring their farmers by imposing import barriers and providing subsidies. These policies have reduced national and global economic welfare, inhibited economic growth, and added to inequality and poverty because no less than three-quarters of the billion poorest people in the world have been dependent directly or indirectly on farming for their livelihoods (World Bank 2007). The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to outline the analytical framework and the common empirical methodology adopted in the global and national case studies reported in subsequent chapters, to summarize and compare the modeling results from the global and national models, and to draw some general policy implications. The findings are based on three chapters (part two) that each use a global model to examine the effects of farm and nonfarm price and trade policies on global poverty and the distribution of poverty within and across many of the countries identified, plus ten individual developing-country studies (parts three-five) spanning the three key regions: Asia (where nearly two-thirds of the world's poor live), Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• PART I INTRODUCTION
• PART II GLOBAL CGE APPROACHES
• PART III NATIONAL CGE APPROACHES: ASIA
• PART IV NATIONAL CGE APPROACHES: AFRICA
• PART V NATIONAL CGE APPROACHES: LATIN AMERICA
• Appendix: Border Price and Export Demand Shocks in Developing Countries from Rest-of-the-World Trade Liberalization: The Linkage Model
• Index
• Figures
• Tables