Agricultural Liberalisation and the Least Developed Countries: Six Fallacies

Arvind Panagariya

The World Economy, 2005, vol. 28, issue 9, 1277-1299

Abstract: Today, agriculture remains the most distorted sector of the world economy. Therefore, agricultural liberalisation in the Doha negotiations is rightly the top priority. But the public‐policy discourse on the subject remains fogged by a number of fallacies. These fallacies probably originated with the leadership of the World Bank but have now been embraced by the IMF, OECD, Oxfam and the leading academic critics of globalisation. The paper identifies six fallacies and offers evidence and analysis to debunk them: (1) Agricultural border protection and subsidies are largely a developed‐country phenomenon. (2) Developed‐country agricultural subsidies and protection hurt the poorest developing countries most. (3) Developed‐country subsidies and protection hurt the poor, rural households in the poorest countries. (4) Developed‐country agricultural protection and subsidies constitute the principal barrier to the development of the poorest developing countries. (5) Agricultural protection reflects double standard and hypocrisy on the part of the developed countries. (6) What the donor countries give with one hand (aid), they take away with the other (farm subsidies).

Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9701.2005.00734.x

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:bla:worlde:v:28:y:2005:i:9:p:1277-1299

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0378-5920

Access Statistics for this article

The World Economy is currently edited by David Greenaway

More articles in The World Economy from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().