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Despite recent reforms, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of agricultural and food price distortions such as producer and consumer support estimates (PSEs and CSEs) can be poor guides to the policies' trade effects. Two recent studies provide much better indicators of trade (and welfare)-reducing effects of farm price and trade policies, but they provide somewhat differing numbers. This article explains why those estimates differ and how they might be improved for use in ongoing annual monitoring of the trade restrictiveness of agricultural policies in both high-income and developing countries. ; The authors are grateful for funding from World Bank Trust Funds provided by the governments of the Netherlands (BNPP), the United Kingdom (DfID), Japan, and Ireland, as well as from the Australian Research Council.

Despite recent reforms, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of agricultural and food price distortions such as producer and consumer support estimates (PSEs and CSEs) can be poor guides to the policies' trade effects. Two recent studies provide much better indicators of trade (and welfare)-reducing effects of farm price and trade policies, but they provide somewhat differing numbers. This article explains why those estimates differ and how they might be improved for use in ongoing annual monitoring of the trade restrictiveness of agricultural policies in both high-income and developing countries. ; The authors are grateful for funding from World Bank Trust Funds provided by the governments of the Netherlands (BNPP), the United Kingdom (DfID), Japan, and Ireland, as well as from the Australian Research Council.

Trade negotiators and policy advisors are keen to know the relative contributions of different farm policy instruments to international trade and economic welfare. Nominal rates of assistance or producer support estimates are incomplete indicators, especially when (as in many developing countries) some commodities are taxed and others are subsidized, in which case positive contributions can offset negative contributions. This paper develops and estimates a new set of more-satisfactory partial equilibrium indicators of the relative contribution of different farm policy instruments to reductions in agricultural trade and welfare. It does so by drawing on the trade restrictiveness index literature and a recently compiled database on distortions to agricultural prices for 75 developing and high-income countries over the period 1960 to 2004. Results confirm earlier findings that border taxes are the dominant instrument affecting global trade and welfare, but they also suggest declines in export taxes contributed nearly as much as cuts in import protection to the trade and welfare effects of agricultural policy reforms since the 1980s. ; The authors are grateful for funding from World Bank Trust Funds provided by the governments of the Netherlands (BNPP), the United Kingdom (DfID) and Ireland, as well as from the Australian Research Council.

Agricultural markets in OECD countries have long been highly distorted by government policies. Traditional weighted average aggregates of the price distortions involved, such as producer and consumer support estimates (PSEs and CSEs), can be poor indicators of the trade restrictiveness and economic welfare losses associated with them, especially if a country's support estimates vary a lot across the product range. Certainly estimates of trade and welfare effects of price supports can be obtained from sectoral or economywide models using price elasticity estimates, but the results can be contentious if there is no consensus on what model specification and elasticity parameters to use. This paper shows that, if there is a willingness to accept simple assumptions about elasticities, it is possible to generate indicators of the welfare and trade restrictiveness of agricultural policies using no more than the price and quantity data needed to generate PSEs and CSEs. These new indexes thus provide an attractive supplement to the current policy monitoring regime developed by the OECD Secretariat. ; Funding from World Bank Trust Funds provided by the governments of the Netherlands (BNPP) and the United Kingdom DfID), and from the Australian Research Council, is gratefully acknowledged.

Trade negotiators and policy advisors are keen to know the relative contributions of different farm policy instruments to international trade and economic welfare. Nominal rates of assistance or producer support estimates are incomplete indicators, especially when (as in many developing countries) some commodities are taxed and others are subsidized, in which case positive contributions can offset negative contributions. This paper develops and estimates a new set of more-satisfactory partial equilibrium indicators of the relative contribution of different farm policy instruments to reductions in agricultural trade and welfare. It does so by drawing on the trade restrictiveness index literature and a recently compiled database on distortions to agricultural prices for 75 developing and high-income countries over the period 1960 to 2004. Results confirm earlier findings that border taxes are the dominant instrument affecting global trade and welfare, but they also suggest declines in export taxes contributed nearly as much as cuts in import protection to the trade and welfare effects of agricultural policy reforms since the 1980s. ; The authors are grateful for funding from World Bank Trust Funds provided by the governments of the Netherlands (BNPP), the United Kingdom (DfID) and Ireland, as well as from the Australian Research Council.

Agricultural markets in OECD countries have long been highly distorted by government policies. Traditional weighted average aggregates of the price distortions involved, such as producer and consumer support estimates (PSEs and CSEs), can be poor indicators of the trade restrictiveness and economic welfare losses associated with them, especially if a country's support estimates vary a lot across the product range. Certainly estimates of trade and welfare effects of price supports can be obtained from sectoral or economywide models using price elasticity estimates, but the results can be contentious if there is no consensus on what model specification and elasticity parameters to use. This paper shows that, if there is a willingness to accept simple assumptions about elasticities, it is possible to generate indicators of the welfare and trade restrictiveness of agricultural policies using no more than the price and quantity data needed to generate PSEs and CSEs. These new indexes thus provide an attractive supplement to the current policy monitoring regime developed by the OECD Secretariat. ; Funding from World Bank Trust Funds provided by the governments of the Netherlands (BNPP) and the United Kingdom DfID), and from the Australian Research Council, is gratefully acknowledged.

This paper summarizes a new database that sheds light on the impact of trade-related policy developments over the past half century on distortions to agricultural incentives and thus also to consumer prices for food in 75 countries spanning the per capita income spectrum. Price support policies of advanced economies hurt not only domestic consumers and exporters of other products but also foreign producers and traders of farm products, and they reduce national and global economic welfare. On the other hand, the governments of many developing countries have directly taxed their farmers over the past half-century, both directly (e.g., export taxes) and also indirectly via overvaluing their currency and restricting imports of manufactures. Thus the price incentives facing farmers in many developing countries have been depressed by both own-country and other countries' agricultural price and international trade policies. The authors summarize these and realted stylized facts that can be drawn from a new World Bank database that is worthy of the attention of political economy theorists, historians and econometricians. These indicators can be helpful in addressing such questions as the following: where is there still a policy bias against agricultural production? To what extent has there been overshooting in the sense that some developing-country food producers are now being protected from import competition along the lines of the examples of earlier-industrializing Europe and Japan? What are the political economy forces behind the more-successful reformers, and how do they compare with those in less-successful countries where major distortions in agricultural incentives remain? And what explains the pattern of distortions across not only countries but also industries and in the choice of support or tax instruments within the agricultural sector of each country?

This working paper summarizes annual estimates of covered product Nominal Rate of Assistance (NRAs), for each of the focus economies of Europe's transition economies, their key distortion indicators defined in Anderson et al. (2008), and provides some summary statistics for the region's estimates. Four tables are provided for each country: (a) the NRA to individual farm products covered in the study and their weighted average, using as weights production valued at undistorted prices; (b) the RRA to producers of agricultural tradable, again using as weights production valued at undistorted prices, and the component parts of the RRA calculation; (c) the weights themselves for individual covered farm products and for the residual non-covered group of products, shown as percentages and so they sum to 100 percent; and (d) the trade status of each covered product each year. The NRA in the case of a product having just its output price distorted by government policies is the percentage by which the domestic producer price exceeds the price that would prevail under free markets, that is, the border price appropriately adjusted to account for differences in product quality, transport costs, processing costs, etc. A negative value indicates the domestic price is below that comparable border price.

This working paper summarizes the annual estimates, for each of the world's main high-income countries, of key distortion indicators defined in Anderson et al. (2008), and provides some summary statistics for the group's estimates. It begins with tables for the countries of Western Europe, followed by Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Shorter versions for subsets of countries are reproduced also as Appendixes in Anderson, Lattimore, Lloyd and MacLaren (2008), Gardner (2008), Honma and Hayami (2008), and Josling (2008). Four tables are provided for each country: (a) the nominal rate of assistance to individual farm products covered in the study and their weighted average, using as weights production valued at undistorted prices; (b) the relative rate of assistance to producers of agricultural (relative to non-agricultural) tradable, again using as weights production valued at undistorted prices, and the component parts of the Relative Rate of Assistance (RRA) calculation; (c) the weights themselves for individual covered farm products and for the residual non-covered group of products, shown as percentages and so they sum to 100 percent; and (d) the trade status of each covered product each year. In the case of the European Union (EU) countries of Western Europe, the trade status is assumed to be that of the EU membership in any given year, since the Nominal Rate of Assistance (NRA) for each product is assumed to be the same for each EU member (with the membership growing progressively from initially 6 to 9 (from 1973), 12 (from 1986), and 15 (from 1995). The average NRAs for all covered products differ across EU member countries though, because of their different weights for each product in their national value of agricultural production.