Many governments of developing countries burdened with international debt are under ever-increasing pressure to use their scarce economic resources wisely. Faced with slow progress in alleviating poverty and stimulating economic growth, they especially need to end wasteful subsidies and revise inefficient tax policies. This book will help staff members of government planning agencies and ministries of finance and agriculture to analyze the effects of government policies on the production, consumption, and export of agricultural commodities. The analytical techniques that Isabelle Tsakok demonstrates in this book are the essential first step in reforming agricultural price policy to bring about a more efficient allocation of resources. After mastering the techniques of single-market, partial-equilibrium analysis, which are the book's focus, policy analysts can use the techniques to identify when more sophisticated methods, such as multi-market analysis and computable general-equilibrium models, are needed to determine what agricultural price policies are "right." Tsakok begins with graphical analysis and data requirements in order to build intuitive understanding, and progresses through steadily more complex techniques, demonstrating—step by step—the calculation of domestic resource costs, effective rates of protection, and related coefficients of protection. Providing a wide range of numerical real-world examples to illustrate the practical application of the partial-equilibrium framework, Agricultural Price Policy is an invaluable reference manual and teaching tool.

The objectives of this study were twofold. The first objective was to measure for the 1960 -84 period the level of price intervention on agricultural products and the effects it had on output, consumption, foreign exchange, the government budget, income transfers between agriculture and the rest of the economy, and income distribution. The second and ultimate objective was to analyze the political economy of price intervention ( to understand the interaction between political and economic forces ). Central to the objectives was the knowledge of what political constraints influenced decisions on agricultural pricing policy, as well as to what extent economic constraints on the government and market forces led to pressures on policymakers to alter farm price policies. An underlying thesis of this study is that agricultural incentives are strongly affected by developments in other sectors of the economy, especially by trade and macroeconomic policies. The report is divided into 3 parts : Part I presents an overview of the economy and the agricultural sector, then gives a descriptive history of agricultural price policies; Part II presents the effects of these policies; and Part III presents the political economy interpretation of these policies. The appendices detail the estimation procedures as well as the basic data used.

This book takes forward our understanding of agricultural input subsidies in low income countries.