Search

This thesis will focus on the issue of linking agricultural policy, agricultural tariffs and trade inter-war Czechoslovakia. It focuses on blending the implementation of agrarian circles Czechoslovak interests in foreign trade. In the field of view of the structure of the ambivalence of the Czechoslovak economy as industrial-agrarian country. The work is the analysis of official statistics of foreign trade. Use of the historical and contemporary literature and archival studies.

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.

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.

Dramatic changes took place in agricultural policies in Europe in the 19th and 20th century. In the 1860s European nations agreed on a series of trade agreements which spread free trade across the continent. In the 1960s European nations concluded an international agreement which spread heavy Government intervention and protection against imports across the continent. This paper offers hypotheses as to the causes of these dramatic changes in agricultural protection.

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.

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.