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For decades, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban 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 agricultural trade and economic growth. They almost certainly add to inequality and poverty in developing countries, since three-quarters of the world's billion poorest people depend on farming for their livelihood. During the past two decades, however, numerous developing country governments have reduced their sectoral and trade policy distortions, while some high-income countries also have begun reducing market-distorting aspects of their farm policies. The author surveys the changing extent of policy distortions to prices faced by developing-country farmers over the past half century, and provides a summary of new empirical estimates from a global economy-wide model that yield estimates of how much could be gained by removing the interventions remaining as of 2004. The author concludes by pointing to the scope and prospects for further pro-poor policy reform in both developing and high-income countries.

During the 1960s and 1970s most developing countries imposed anti-agricultural policies, while many high-income countries restricted agricultural imports and subsidized their farmers. Both sets of policies inhibited economic growth and poverty alleviation in developing countries, while doing little to assist small farmers in high-income countries. Since the 1980s, however, many developing countries began to reduce the anti-agricultural bias of sectoral policies, and from the early 1990s the European Union began to move away from price supports to more-direct forms of farm income payments. This paper summarizes a forthcoming book that seeks to explain this evolving pattern of distortions to incentives conceptually and econometrically by making use of new political economy theory and a new globally comprehensive and consistent set of estimates of the changing extent of annual distortions over the past half-century. The distortion estimates involve more than 70 products that cover around 70 percent of the value of agricultural output in each of 75 countries that together account for over 90 percent of the global economy, and they expose the contribution of the various policy instruments (both farm and non-farm) to the net distortion to farmer incentives. Such a widespread coverage of countries, products, years and policy instruments has allowed this collection of studies to test a wide range of hypotheses suggested by the new political economy literature, including the importance of institutions. As a set it sheds much new light on the underlying forces that have affected incentives facing farmers in the course of national and global economic and political development, and hence on how those distortions might change in the future - or be changed by concerted actions to offset political pressures from traditionally powerful vested interests.

This chapter begins with a brief summary of the long history of national distortions to agricultural markets. It then outlines the methodology used to generate annual indicators of the extent of government interventions in markets, details of which are provided in Anderson and appendix A. A description of the economies under study and their economic growth and structural changes over recent decades is then briefly presented as a preface to the main section of the chapter, in which the nominal rates of assistance and consumer tax equivalents (NRA and CTE) estimates are summarized across regions and over the decades since the 1950s. These estimates are discussed in far more detail in the regional chapters that follow. A summary is also provided of an additional set of indicators of agricultural price distortions presented in chapter eleven that are based on the trade restrictiveness index first developed by Anderson and Neary (2005). In chapter twelve the focus shifts from countries to commodities, and all the various distortion indicators are used to provide a sense of how distorted are each of the key farm commodity markets globally. Then chapter thirteen uses the study's NRA and CTE estimates to provide a new set of results from a global economy-wide model that attempts to quantify the impacts on global markets, net farm incomes and welfare of the reforms since the early 1980s and of the policies still in place as of 2004. The chapter concludes by drawing on the lessons learned to speculate on the prospects for further reducing the disarray in world agricultural markets.

This chapter begins with a brief summary of economic growth and structural changes in the region since the 1950s and of agricultural and other economic policies as they affected agriculture before and after the various reforms, and in several cases fundamental regime changes, of the past half-century. It then summarizes new estimates of the nominal rate of assistance (NRA) and the relative rate of assistance (RRA) to farmers delivered by national farm and nonfarm policies over the past several decades (depending on data availability), and of those policies' impacts on consumer prices of farm products. Both farmer assistance and consumer taxation is negative in periods where there is an anti-agricultural, pro-urban consumer bias in a country's policy regime. The final sections summarize what the author have learned and draw out implications of the findings, including for poverty and inequality and for possible future directions of policies affecting agricultural incentives in this part of Asia.

Abstract.  This paper provides estimates of the potential gains to the Asia Pacific region from completely freeing merchandise trade globally and from partial liberalizations that might emerge from the Doha Round. Particular attention is given to agriculture, where the majority of the gains would arise. The results suggest that moving to free global merchandise trade would boost real incomes in the Western Pacific proportionately more than in other regions. The Doha partial liberalization scenarios considered would move the world only a small way towards complete free trade, but inreasingly so the more developing countries themselves are willing to open up.

Until very recently, most grape-based wine was consumed close to where it was produced, and mostly that was in Europe. Barely one-tenth of the world's wine production was exported prior to the 1970s, even counting intra-European trade. The latest wave of globalization has changed that forever. Now more than one-third of all wine consumed globally is produced in another country, and Europe's dominance of global wine trade has been greatly diminished by the surge of exports from 'New World' producers. New consumers also have come onto the scene as incomes have grown, eating habits have changed and tastes have broadened. Asia in particular is emerging as a new and rapidly growing wine market – and in China that is stimulating the development of local, modern production capability that, in volume terms, already rivals that of Argentina, Australia and South Africa. This latest edition of global wine statistics therefore not only updates data to 2009 and revises past data, but also expands on earlier editions in a number of ways. For example, we now separately identify an extra eight Asian countries or customs areas (Hong Kong, India, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand) in addition to China and Japan. We also include more than 50 new tables to cover such items as excise and import taxes, per capita expenditure on wine, the share of domestic sales in off-trade, the shares of the largest firms in national markets and globally, and the most powerful wine brands globally. Given the growing interest in the health aspects of alcohol consumption, we now express it per adult as well as per capita. Perhaps the most significant addition to this latest version is a new section that provides estimates of the volume, value and hence unit value of wine production, consumption, exports and imports for four catagories: sparkling wines, and non-premium, commercial-premium and super-premium still wines.

The Economics discipline at the University of Adelaide has a distinguished 100 year history of which the University and the State of South Australia can be proud.Very few other departments, of any discipline in Australian universities, could claim to have a majority of its lecturer appointments rising to full Professor status over a period as long as 1901 to 1995.Nor would many other university departments be able to say they have had five of their graduates win Rhodes Scholarships in the past 12 years.

The countries of the South Pacific have struggled to generate sustainable economic growth since their independence. Interventionist policies have failed in the past here, as they have in all other regions. Business and government leaders in this region are now beginning to acknowledge - as has happened in many other developing country regions over the past two decades - that major reforms are needed to put their economies onto a higher growth path. This study examines the growth record of key Pacific island economies and identifies the reasons for their relatively poor performance. It then looks at the process of globalization that is affecting those and indeed all economies increasingly; and the role the WTO has played in that process

The Economics discipline at the University of Adelaide has a distinguished 100 year history of which the University and the State of South Australia can be proud. Very few other departments, of any discipline in Australian universities, could claim to have a majority of its lecturer appointments rising to full Professor status over a period as long as 1901 to 1995.

Nor would many other university departments be able to say they have had five of their graduates win Rhodes Scholarships in the past 12 years.

The countries of the South Pacific have struggled to generate sustainable economic growth since their independence. Interventionist policies have failed in the past here, as they have in all other regions. Business and government leaders in this region are now beginning to acknowledge - as has happened in many other developing country regions over the past two decades - that major reforms are needed to put their economies onto a higher growth path. This study examines the growth record of key Pacific island economies and indentifies the reasons for their relatively poor performance. It then looks at the process of globalization that is affecting those and indeed all economies increasingly; and the role the WTO has played in that process.

Rapid trade-led economic growth in emerging Asia has been shifting the global economic and industrial centres of gravity away from the north Atlantic, raising the importance of Asia in world trade but also altering the commodity composition of trade by Asia and other regions. What began with Japan in the 1950s and the Republic of Korea and Taipei,China from the late 1960s has spread to the much more populous ASEAN region, the People's Republic of China, and India. This paper examines how that growth and associated structural changes are altering agricultural markets in particular and thereby food security. It does so retrospectively and by projecting a model of the world economy that compares alternative growth strategies, trade policy scenarios and savings behaviors to 2030. Projected impacts on sectoral shares of gross domestic product (GDP), "openness" to trade and the composition and direction of trade are drawn out, followed by effects of the boom in non-farm sectors on agricultural self-sufficiency and real food consumption per capita in Asia and elsewhere. The paper concludes by drawing implications for policies that can address more efficiently Asia's concerns about food security and rural-urban income disparity than the trade policy measures used by earlier-industrializing Northeast Asia.