Food Security and Agricultural Protection in South Korea

John Beghin (), Jean-Christophe Bureau and Sung Joon Park

Staff General Research Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: South Korea has been pursuing food self-sufficiency using high tariffs and high administrative prices in key agricultural and food markets. Using a dual approach to trade and trade restrictiveness indices, we analyze the impact of these market distortions on welfare and trade volume. Then, we compute second-best distortions, which minimize the welfare cost of meeting observed levels of self-sufficiency and production. We rationalize these second-best distortions to what could be claimed as legitimate protection under a "food security" (FS) box in World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations. FS-box protection is sensitive to changes in the definition and the extent of the FS objectives. We show that FS via production targets and reliance on imports would be more palatable to consumers and trade partners, while preserving income transfer to the farm sector.

JEL-codes: A1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
Date: 2001-09-10
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Published in American Journal of Agricultural Economics, August 2003, Vol. 85, No. 3, pp. 618-32.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.card.iastate.edu/publications/DBS/PDFFiles/01wp284.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Food Security and Agricultural Protection in South Korea (2001)
Working Paper: Food Security and Agricultural Protection in South Korea (2001)
Journal Article: Food Security and Agricultural Protection in South Korea (2003)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isu:genres:2006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff General Research Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics
Address: Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Stephanie Bridges ().