An Integrated Approach to agricultural trade and development issues : exploring the welfare and distribution issues
Imprint
New York; Geneva, United Nations. 2001
Descript
vi, 43 p.
SUMMARY
Computable general equilibrium (CGE) analysis has been widely used to analyse the economic effects of trade liberalization initiatives. By way of illustration, this paper begins by reviewing CGE studies of trade liberalization within the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), including studies of the effects of agricultural trade liberalization. Although these studies predict substantial welfare gains, they fail to address the developmental and political economy issues which typically cause Governments to hold back from agricultural trade liberalization. Distributional effects are central to these issues. Using a proposal known as the APEC Food System as a case study, the paper outlines and illustrates an extension of CGE methodology that allows an exploration of the distributional effects of agricultural trade liberalization, and of how welfare and distribution outcomes can be modified by various types of policies designed to improve labour productivity in the agricultural sector. In the process it is shown how this extended CGE methodology can throw light on the potential of appropriately designed policies of this kind to simultaneously improve both welfare and distribution outcomes of trade liberalization. [English only]
SUBJECT
Asia Pacific Economic Association
Free trade -- Econometric models
Produce trade -- Econometric models
LOCATION
CALL#
STATUS
International Institute for Trade and Developement : UNCTAD Collection
