Government Distortions of Agricultural Prices: Lessons from Rich and Emerging Economies

摘要: For many decades agricultural protection and subsidies in high-income (and some middle-income) countries have been depressing international prices of farm products, which lowers the earnings farmers associated rural businesses developing countries. That worsened between 1950s early 1980s (Anderson et al., 1986), thereby adding to global inequality poverty because three-quarters world’s poorest people depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their main income (World Bank, 2007). In addition that external policy influence poverty, however, governments taxed over past half-century. A well-known example is taxing exports plantation crops postcolonial Africa (Bates, 1981). At same time, chose also pursue an import-substituting industrialization strategy, predominantly by restricting imports manufactures, overvalue currency. Together those measures producers other tradable products economies, far majority them being (Krueger 1988, 1991).