One of every two people in Sub-Saharan Africa survives on less than $1.25 a day. That proportion has changed little over the past three decades, unlike in Asia and elsewhere, so the region's share of global poverty has risen from one-tenth to almost one-third since 1980. About 70 percent of...

This study is part of a global research project seeking to understand the changing scope and impact of the policy bias against agriculture and the reasons behind agricultural policy reforms in Africa, Europe's transition economies, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia. One purpose of the...

The main purpose of this study is to assess the changing landscape of agricultural protection and taxation patterns in the region. The study is based on the EU-10 sample, plus Turkey, as well as seven countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS): Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, the...

This book provides an overview of the evolution of distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price and trade policies in the World Bank-defined region of Latin America and the Caribbean. Following the introduction and summary, it includes commissioned country studies of one Caribbean, one...

For decades, 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 reduce national and global economic...

For more than a century, government policies have grossly distorted resource use in agriculture, both within and between countries. 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...

Notwithstanding the tariffication component of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, import tariffs on farm products continue to provide an incomplete indication of the extent to which agricultural producer and consumer incentives are distorted in national markets. As well, in developing...

For decades, agricultural price and trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa hampered farmers' contributions to economic growth and poverty reduction. This paper draws on a modification of so-called trade restrictiveness indexes to provide theoretically precise partial-equilibrium indicators of the...

This book provides an overview of the evolution of distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price, trade, and exchange rate policies in a large sample of countries spanning the world. This chapter begins with a brief summary of the long history of national distortions to agricultural...

This book provides an overview of the evolution of distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price and trade policies in the economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) that are transitioning away from central planning. It includes country and sub-regional studies of the ten...