Distortions to Agricultural Versus Nonagricultural Producer Incentives

Kym Anderson

Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2009, vol. 1, issue 1, 55-74

Abstract: For more than a century, government policies have grossly distorted resource use in agriculture, both within and between countries. Earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a prourban bias in own-country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduce national and global economic welfare and inhibit economic growth; they also add to inequality and poverty in developing countries. Since the 1980s, however, numerous developing and some high-income country governments have reduced their sectoral and trade policy distortions. This paper draws on new empirical studies to show the changing extent of policy distortions to prices faced by the world's farmers since the 1950s. Modeling results provide an indication of how far those reforms proceeded between the early 1980s and 2004 and of how much scope remains for removing continuing inefficiencies in global agricultural resource use.

Keywords: distorted farm prices; trade policy reforms; inefficient resource use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 O13 Q12 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (92)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.resource.050708.144236 (application/pdf)
Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anr:reseco:v:1:y::p:55-74

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.annualreviews.org/action/ecommerce

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Annual Review of Resource Economics from Annual Reviews Annual Reviews 4139 El Camino Way Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by http://www.annualreviews.org ().