The Uruguay Round and Welfare in Some Distorted Agricultural Economies

James Anderson

No 5923, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: There is widespread concern that the Uruguay Round may reduce the welfare of developing countries through its effect on world agricultural prices. Reduced agricultural price distortions among major supplying nations are predicted to increase basic food prices and decrease some important export prices such as those for coffee and cotton. It appears that raising food prices paid by food importers must be bad for them, while reducing world coffee and cotton prices appears bad for exporters of those products. Appearances may be deceiving, however, since theory shows that a distortion effect operates alongside the standard terms of trade effect. I report here distortion effects which are many times larger" than terms of trade effects in an analysis of the Uruguay Round's impact on 9 agricultural economies. I deploy a simple Computable General Equilibrium model. The 9 developing economies are distorted by domestic agricultural distortions in 15 markets, along with hundreds of 4 digit nonagricultural tariffs and quotas. In 3 of 9 countries, the distortion effect reverses the impact of the terms of trade effect. In 2 other countries the distortion effect raises a trivial terms of trade effect up to around 1% of national income.

JEL-codes: F13 F14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-02
Note: ITI
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 56 (1998): 393-410.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5923.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Uruguay Round and welfare in some distorted agricultural economies (1998)
Working Paper: The Uruguay Round and Welfare in Some Distorted Agricultural Economies (1997)
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:nbr:nberwo:5923

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5923

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().