The Effects Of Internal And External Trade Liberalisation On Agricultural Growth

Developing countries as a group stand to gain very substantially from trade reform in agricultural commodities. Agricultural Trade Liberalization and the Least Developed Countries is the first book to address important questions relating to this subject. The authors are world renowned experts on international trade and development and they address a very important and timely issue.

Global trade liberalization-- reducing both negative and positive protection in line with the Dunkel proposal-- would gain developing countries an estimated $60 billion a year.

"Based on an international symposium held in Paris from 5th to 6th October 1989 ... jointly organised by the World Bank and the OECD Development Centre ...".

This study constitutes an attempt to empirically evaluate, in a cross-country context, the respective roles of various theories of dynamic gains from trade liberalization in explaining observed positive impact of trade openness on development and agriculture sector and the prospected role of the agriculture sector in development. Development, in this study, is measured as compound indicators of the life expectancy, per capita income, child mortality, and primary school enrollment. The overall objective of the study is to investigate the impacts of trade liberalization on the development of developing countries and the role of the agricultural sector in the economic development. In order to give insights and provide policy guidelines that would enable its adaptation to meet the changing needs of the agricultural sectors in these countries. This involves the investigation of the impacts of trade liberalization (openness) on the main factors that affect the agricultural sector. This includes the exploration of the impacts of trade liberalization on agricultural trade, agricultural production, agricultural value added and agricultural growth measured as growth in agricultural value added. In addition to other economic development elements, such as, foreign XII direct investment, domestic investment rate, macroeconomic policy quality, size of the government, and black premium market. In this study, a system of simultaneous equations; aimed to identify the various effects of trade policy on development and agricultural sector elements, and the effects of these variables on the growth. For each equation in the system, the results of the estimation procedure are applied to three variants of the same model. These are the baseline model for this study, for the year 1980, 1990 and 1999. Each equation of the model represents the total sample of (74) countries belonging to middle income developing countries according to World Bank classification of the countries for the year 1998. A total of (32) exogenous variables and (11) endogenous variables (channel variables) that are consist the agricultural and economic development are used for the three time periods. For the baseline, only (30) exogenous variables were used, because of lack of data on import commodities and the import concentration for the year 1980. The total effects of the trade policy on economic and agricultural development elements and the agricultural growth and the impact of the agricultural growth on these elements are computed for the time period. The total effect of agricultural growth in development varies from (0.044)% in 1980 to (0.072)% in 1990, which reflects the impact of agricultural sector role in development level. The net effect varies from channel to channel and from year to year, both in sign and magnitudes The magnitudes of each channel variables varied from year to year, and within the same model. The total effect of these channel variables explain about (10) of total increase in development level for the year 1980 and only (4.1%) and (8.9%) for the years 1990 and 1999 respectively. that is there are more variables that influence the development level rather than trade policy.

The European Community's Common Agricultural Policy has come under attack for its protectionist character and propensity for causing high domestic food prices and wasting financial resources. Here, contributors analyze the most important economic models of agricultural trade in order to assess the effect of liberalization on world food prices, national GETs, international trade, intersectoral and interregional income distribution, and agricultural incomes.

Thirteen papers selected and revised from the 1996 conference hosted by the Department of Economics, U. of Crete, present views on the sustainability and policy aspects of free trade concerning European Union agriculture. Part I (chapters 1-3) treats theoretical and methodological issues. Part II (chapters 4-6) addresses these issues specifically in the context of EU agriculture. The experience of several EU countries is presented in Part III (chapters 7-11), while Part IV (chapters 12, 13) looks ahead to future developments and to the 1999 World Trade Organization conference. Tables and figures delineate models and variables. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book brings empirical analysis to bear on the policy debate on the economic and environmental impacts of agricultural trade liberalisation on a small developing country, represented by the island of Fiji. It is timely because many African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries are faced with challenges in the years ahead as a result of globalisation and liberalisation of world trade. Some ACP countries, including Fiji, have already signed an interim Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union to replace the Cotonou Agreement. Other future changes in the trading regime are likely to come from the eventual conclusion of the Doha Round. What is lacking in the current debate is solid empirical analysis to investigate the impacts of these policy changes. What little analysis has been carried out lumps developing countries into regional aggregates. Thus, it may be argued that these studies do not take account of the individual countries' circumstances. The book focuses on the sugar industry to discuss the broad topic of agricultural reform. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to support the analysis and discussion in the areas of structural reform in the sugar and other industries as well as the effects of trade liberalisation strategies. The empirical investigation is carried out using appropriate econometric techniques and a dynamic computable general equilibrium model. The material is presented in such a way that the non-technical reader will also benefit from the discussion, which has policy making as its focus. It should appeal to a wide readership including policymakers, policy analysts, researchers in industry and the public sector, as well as postgraduate students in various fields such as agriculture and natural resources, international trade, and economic modelling.