Abstract: 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. Especially in developing countries, non-agricultural policies indirectly impact agricultural and food markets. Empirical analysis aimed at monitoring distortions to agricultural incentives thus need to examine both agricultural and non-agricultural policy measures including import or export taxes, subsidies and quantitative restrictions, plus domestic taxes or subsidies on farm outputs or inputs and consumer subsidies for food staples. This paper addresses the practical methodological issues that need to be faced when attempting to undertake such a measurement task in developing countries. The approach is illustrated in two ways: by presenting estimates of nominal and relative rates of assistance to farmers in China for the period 1981 to 2005; and by summarizing estimates from an economy-wide computable general equilibrium model of the effects on agricultural versus non-agricultural markets of the project's measured distortions globally as of 2004.

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. Especially in developing countries, non-agricultural policies indirectly impact agricultural and food markets. Empirical analysis aimed at monitoring distortions to agricultural incentives thus need to examine both agricultural and non-agricultural policy measures including import or export taxes, subsidies and quantitative restrictions, plus domestic taxes or subsidies on farm outputs or inputs and consumer subsidies for food staples. This paper addresses the practical methodological issues that need to be faced when attempting to undertake such a measurement task in developing countries. The approach is illustrated in two ways: by presenting estimates of nominal and relative rates of assistance to farmers in China for the period 1981 to 2005; and by summarizing estimates from an economy-wide computable general equilibrium model of the effects on agricultural versus non-agricultural markets of the project's measured distortions globally as of 2004.

This paper outlines the methodological issues associated with the task of measuring that actual delivered direct protection or taxation to individual agricultural industries, as well as the direct protection or anti-protection to non-agricultural sectors. It begins with a guide to what elements in principle could be measured. There are two key purposes of the distortion estimates being generated by this project are: 1) to provide a long annual time series of indicators showing the extent to which price incentives faced by farmers and food consumers have been distorted directly and indirectly by own-government policies in all major developing, transition and high-income countries, and hence for the world as a whole; and 2) to attribute the price distortion estimates for each farm product to specific border or domestic policy measures, so they can serve as inputs into various types of partial and general equilibrium economic models for estimating the effects of those various policies on such things as national and international agricultural markets, farm value added, income inequality, poverty, and national, regional and global welfare.

This volume in the 'Distortions to Agricultural Incentives' series focus on distortions to agricultural incentives from a global perspective.

The vast majority of the world s poorest households depend on farming for their livelihoods. During the 1960s and 1970s, most developing countries imposed pro-urban and anti-agricultural policies, while many high-income countries restricted agricultural imports and subsidized their farmers. Both sets of policies inhibited economic growth and poverty alleviation in developing countries. Although progress has been made over the past two decades to reduce those policy biases, many trade- and welfare-reducing price distortions remain between agriculture and other sectors and within the agricultural sector of both rich and poor countries. Comprehensive empirical studies of the disarray in world agricultural markets appeared approximately 20 years ago. Since then, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has provided estimates each year of market distortions in high-income countries, but there have been no comparable estimates for the world s developing countries. This volume is the third in a series (other volumes cover Asia, Europe s transition economies, and Latin America and the Caribbean) that not only fills that void for recent years but extends the estimates in a consistent and comparable way back in time and provides analytical narratives for scores of countries that shed light on the evolving nature and extent of policy interventions over the past half-century. 'Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Africa' provides an overview of the evolution of distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price and trade policies in the Arab Republic of Egypt plus 20 countries that account for about of 90 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa s population, farm households, agricultural output, and overall GDP. Sectoral, trade, and exchange rate policies in the region have changed greatly since the 1950s, and there have been substantial reforms since the 1980s. Nonetheless, numerous price distortions in this region remain, others have been added in recent years, and there has also been some backsliding, such as in Zimbabwe. The new empirical indicators in these country studies provide a strong evidence-based foundation for assessing the successes and failures of the past and for evaluating policy options for the years ahead.