Agricultural Price Distortions, Inequality, and Poverty : Introduction and Summary
Reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions affecting agriculture in developing countries, particularly by cuts to agricultural export taxes and by some reductions in government assistance to agriculture in high-income countries,...
Main Authors: | , , |
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Format: | Working Paper |
Language: | English en_US |
Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/236331468169754921/Agricultural-price-distortions-inequality-and-poverty-introduction-and-summary http://hdl.handle.net/10986/28148 |
Summary: | Reforms in recent decades have sharply
reduced the distortions affecting agriculture in developing
countries, particularly by cuts to agricultural export taxes
and by some reductions in government assistance to
agriculture in high-income countries, but international
trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted
than trade in nonfarm goods. This paper summarizes a series
of empirical studies that focus on the effects of the
remaining distortions to world merchandise trade for poverty
and inequality, especially in developing countries. To
obtain different insights into the various impacts, two
global studies are undertaken using the World Bank's
Linkage model, one multi-country study uses the Global Trade
Analysis Project (GTAP) model, and ten country case studies
are also included, each using a national economy-wide model.
The Linkage model results suggest that liberalization will
reduce international inequality, largely by boosting farm
incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in
developing countries, and will reduce the number of poor
people worldwide by 3 percent. The analysis based on the
GTAP model for a sample of 15 countries, and the ten
stand-alone national case studies, all point to larger
reductions in poverty, especially if only the non-poor are
subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the
loss of trade tax revenue. |
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