The Political Economy of Agricultural Price Distortions

Kym Anderson

Agu 2010 · Cambridge University Press

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Despite numerous policy reforms since the 1980s, farm product prices remain heavily distorted in both high-income and developing countries. This book seeks to improve our understanding of why societies adopted these policies, and why some but not other countries have undertaken reforms. Drawing on recent developments in political economy theories and in the generation of empirical measures of the extent of price distortions, the present volume provides both analytical narratives of the historical origins of agricultural protectionism in various parts of the world and a set of political econometric analyses aimed at explaining the patterns of distortions that have emerged over the past five decades. These new studies shed much light on the forces affecting incentives and those facing farmers in the course of national and global economic and political development. They also show how those distortions might change in the future.

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Kym Anderson is George Gollin Professor of Economics, School of Economics, University of Adelaide, Australia. During 2004–7 he was on extended leave at the World Bank's Development Research Group as Lead Economist, Trade Policy. Earlier, he spent 1990–92 at the Research Division of the GATT (now the WTO) Secretariat in Geneva. Professor Anderson has published approximately 300 articles and 40 books, including The Political Economy of Agricultural Protection (with Yujiro Hayami and others, which received the Tohata Memorial Award from Japan's National Institute for Research Advancement), Disarray in World Food Markets (with Rod Tyers, Cambridge University Press, 1992), New Silk Roads (Cambridge University Press, 1992), and Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda (with Will Martin, which received the American Agricultural Economics Association's 2006 Quality of Communication Award and the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society's 2007 Quality of Research Discovery Prize). During 2006–9 Professor Anderson directed a large empirical research project for the World Bank on distortions to agricultural incentives, covering 75 countries. Four region-oriented books and two global-oriented books appeared in 2008–9 and 2009–10, respectively, from this research project, in addition to this present book.