Analysis of price intervention; The output effects of price intervention; Resource transfers and budget effects; Income distribution effects; Some reflections on the political economy of price intervention.

This new series of comparative studies from the World Bank examines how policies have affected agriculture in eighteen developing countries. It considers the impact of both direct policies toward agriculture and of general development policies on incentives confronting agricultural producers and on agriculture's contribution to development. It is shown that general policies can have effects even more powerful than direct policies on incentives. Price discrimination is estimated against agriculture in individual countries, how it has changed over time, and the political-economic factors that guided the evolution. The authors evaluate the effects of this price discrimination on such key macroeconomic variables as foreign exchange earnings, agricultural output, and income distribution. A full range of country experience is drawn upon to give insight into the motivations of policymakers, the economic and political factors determining agricultural interventions, and the attempts to reform unsuccessful policies.

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.