Suchergebnisse

The volume on agricultural price distortions, inequality and poverty begins with a global study that uses the World Bank's linkage model to examine the economic impacts in various countries, regions and the world as a whole of agricultural and trade policies as of 2004. It does so by shocking that model with the removal of all agricultural price-distorting domestic and border policies with, and without, the removal of trade policies affecting all other goods. That pair of shocks is also employed in another global study in that volume to examine the inequality and poverty implications of those price-distorting policies for more than 100 countries. Then for ten national studies reported in that volume, the Linkage model again is used, but only to provide an exogenous set of shocks to the national economy wide model employed by the authors of each developing country case study. The effects of that shock on a national economy are then compared with the effects of own-country liberalization using the same national model and the same agricultural protection rates for that country as in the global Linkage model. In this appendix the authors describe the main assumptions adopted to generate the border price and export demand shocks from agricultural and trade policy reforms by the rest of the world, and how that is communicated to the national models.

This paper analyzes the economic effects of agricultural price and merchandise trade policies around the world as of 2004 on global markets, net farm incomes, and national and regional economic welfare and poverty, using the global economy wide Linkage model, new estimates of agricultural price distortions for developing countries, and poverty elasticity's approach. It addresses two questions: to what extent are policies as of 2004 still reducing rewards from farming in developing countries and thereby adding to inequality across countries in farm household incomes? Are they depressing value added more in primary agriculture than in the rest of the economy of developing countries, and earnings of unskilled workers more than of owners of other factors of production, thereby potentially contributing to inequality and poverty within developing countries (given that farm incomes are well below non-farm incomes in most developing countries and that agriculture there is intensive in the use of unskilled labor)? Results are presented for the key countries and regions of the world and for the world as a whole. They reveal that, by moving to free markets, income inequality between countries will be reduced at least slightly, all but one-sixth of the gains to developing countries will come from agricultural policy reform, unskilled workers in developing countries the majority of whom work on farms will benefit most from reform, net farm incomes in developing countries will rise by 6 percent compared with 2 percent for non-agricultural value added, and the number of people surviving on less than US$1 a day will drop 3 percent globally.

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, which reduce national and global economic welfare and contribute to global inequality and poverty, have been undergoing reform since the 1980s. Using the linkage model of the global economy and modifications to the pre-release of version 7 of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) protection database for 2004, this paper seeks to compare the effect of those reforms to date with those that would come from removing remaining agricultural and trade policies. Two sets of results are thus presented: one showing the effects of policy reforms between 1980-84 and 2004, the other showing what the removal of remaining distortions as of 2004 could be. Both sets of results indicate improvements in the real value of agricultural output and exports, the real returns to farm land and unskilled labor, and real net farm incomes in most developing country regions despite the adverse effect on the international terms of trade for some developing countries that are net food importers or are enjoying preferential access to agricultural markets of high-income countries. Landowners in those high-income countries still offering their farmers price supports could readily afford to compensate them from the benefits of removing remaining agricultural protectionism.

Over the medium time horizon, skill upgrading, differentials in sectoral technological progress, and migration of labor out of farming activities are some of the major structural adjustment factors shaping the evolution of an economy and its connected poverty trends. The main focus of the authors is understanding, for the case of Brazil, how a trade shock interacts with these structural forces and ascertaining whether it enhances or hinders medium-term poverty reduction. In particular, they consider the interactions between the migration of labor out of agriculture, a potentially important poverty reduction factor, and trade liberalization, which increases the price incentives to stay in agriculture. A recursive-dynamic computable general equilibrium model simulates Doha scenarios and compares them against a business as usual scenario. The authors estimate the poverty effects using a microsimulation model that primarily takes into account individuals' labor supply decisions. Their analysis shows that trade liberalization does contribute to structural poverty reduction. But unless increased productivity and stronger growth rates are attributed to trade reform, its contribution to medium-term poverty reduction is rather small.