Despite reforms over the past quarter-century, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of those price distortions such as the nominal rate of assistance and consumer tax equivalent provide measures of the degree of intervention, but they...

For decades, agricultural price and trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa hamperedfarmers’ contributions to economic growth and poverty reduction. While there hasbeen much policy reform over the past two decades, the injections of agriculturaldevelopment funding, together with on-going regional...

Trade negotiators and policy advisors are keen to know the relative contribution ofdifferent farm policy instruments to international trade and economic welfare.Nominal rates of assistance or producer support estimates are incomplete indicators,especially when (especially in developing...

A decline in governmental distortions to agricultural and other trade since the 1980s hascontributed to economic growth and poverty alleviation globally. But new modeling resultssuggest that has taken the world only three-fifths of the way towards freeing merchandisetrade, and that farm policies...

The recent upward spike in the international price of food led some countries to raise export barriers. As in previous price spike periods, that response by some food-exporting countries was accompanied by a lowering of import restrictions by numerous food-importing countries. Both actions...

When prices spike in international grain markets, national governments often reduce the extent to which that spike affects their domestic food markets. Those actions exacerbate the price spike and international welfare transfer associated with that terms of trade change. Several recent analyses...

The global database developed as an integral part of the World Bank's research project on Distortions to Agricultural Incentives, which is publicly available at www.worldbank.org/agdistortions, provides around 30,000 estimates of nominal rates of assistance to agricultural industries (NRAs) and...

This paper summarizes a new database that sheds light on the impact of trade-related policy developments over the past half century on distortions to agricultural incentives and thus also to consumer prices for food in 75 countries spanning the per capita income spectrum. Price-support policies...

Despite reforms over the past quarter-century, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of those price distortions such as the nominal rate of assistance and consumer tax equivalent provide measures of the degree of intervention, but they...

For decades, earnings from farming in many low-income 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...