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...

A study of distortions to agricultural incentives in 18 developing countries during 1960-84, by Krueger, Schiff and Valdés (1988; 1991), found that policies in most of those developing countries were directly or indirectly harming their farmers. Since the mid-1980s there has been a substantial...

Over the past two decades, earnings from farming in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia have been altered hugely by government sectoral and trade policy reforms. This paper summarizes evidence on the changing extent of distortions to markets for farm products since...

For decades, trade between countries in agricultural products has been distorted by policies of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Agricultural trade has often also been limited by an anti-agricultural, pro-urban bias in many developing country policies....

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but...

Food prices in international markets spiked upwards in 2008, doubling or more in a matter of months. Evidence is still being compiled on policy responses over the following two years, but new time series estimates of government intervention for the previous five decades allow insights into past...

Despite recent reforms, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of agricultural and food price distortions such as producer and consumer support estimates (PSEs and CSEs) can be poor guides to the policiesÂ’ trade effects. Two recent...

Trade negotiators and policy advisors are keen to know the relative contribution of different 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...