Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Asia

This study is part of a global research project seeking to understand the changing scope and impact of the policy bias against agriculture and the reasons behind agricultural policy reforms in Africa, Europe's transition economies, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia. One purpose of the project is to obtain quantitative indicators of the effects of recent policy interventions. A second objective is to gain a deeper understanding of the political economy of trends in the distortions in agricultural incentives in various national settings. The third goal is to use this deeper understanding to explore the prospects for reducing the distortions in agricultural incentives and discover the likely implications for agricultural competitiveness, equality, and poverty reduction in many countries, large and small. This book provides an overview of the evolution of the distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price and trade policies in the World Bank-defined regions of East Asia and South Asia. The volume includes an introduction and summary chapter and commissioned studies of three Northeast Asian, five Southeast Asian, and four South Asian economies. The chapters are followed by two appendixes. The first appendix describes the methodology the authors have used to measure the nominal and relative rates of assistance for farmers and the taxes and subsidies on food consumption. The second appendix provides summaries of the author's annual estimates of these rates of assistance across the focus economies. Together, the 12 economies the authors study account for no less than 95 percent of the region's agricultural value added, farm households, total population, and total gross domestic product.