Georeferenced Assessment of Trade Liberalization Effects on Agriculture in Ecuador

As the use of global and national computable general equilibrium (CGE) models has become more widespread, most policies still remain at the regional or sub-national level. This level of disparity requires an approach that bridges the gap between national results and sub-national policies. This study provides a methodology that combines micro-level information and the results of a CGE model with geographical information to spatially map the effects of trade liberalization on the agricultural sector. This methodology enables to distribute changes in value of production for each production unit according to the importance of a specific crop in the political administrative unit. These results show the geographic effects of the FTA on Ecuador's agriculture, and how various types of producers would be affected from trade liberalization. This kind of results would enable policy makers to formulate policies in a geographic or territorial way. This would also allow policy makers to implement differentiated policies to help different types of farmers groups cope with potential negative impacts from free trade.