Agricultural Trade Reform Under Doha and Poverty in India

We use computable general equilibrium methods to examine the impact that agricultural trade reform under the Doha agreement would have on the Indian economy, in particular on household level welfare. The GTAP model is used to simulate the effect of the latest proposed modalities on the global economy, and those results are then used in a model of India with nine household groups identified by their source of income and consumption pattern. We find that both Doha and comprehensive agricultural trade reform would raise Indian aggregate welfare, with the latter having a much greater impact than the former, but may have a negative impact on the welfare of some rural groups. Overall poverty falls under comprehensive reform and is virtually unchanged under the Doha proposals. Empirical estimates of the distributions of trade elasticities are used to test the robustness of the results.