Effects of Liberalizing World Agricultural Trade: A Review of Modeling Studies

摘要

A major issue on the agenda of the ongoing Doha Round of multilateral negotiations by members of the World Trade Organization concerns how and to what extent policies that affect agricultural trade should be liberalized. For most of the postwar period, the series of multilateral negotiating rounds under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade allowed policies that distort agricultural trade to continue in large part while tariffs and other policies that distort trade in other sectors were progressively reduced or eliminated. The Uruguay Round, which took place from 1986 through 1994, began the liberalization of agricultural trade; yet tariffs remain much higher, and the use of subsidies remains much more prevalent, in agriculture than in other goods-producing industries. In August 2005, in response to a request by the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published a paper that presented statistics on policies around the world that distort agricultural trade. In December 2005, in response to the same request, CBO published a paper that surveyed the results of studies that estimate the economic effects of liberalizing those policies. The December paper was brief, focusing on the general conclusions that could be drawn from the studies and selected numerical results to illuminate them. This paper gives a more complete presentation of the numerical results as well as additional explanation concerning their interpretation. In keeping with CBO's mandate to provide objective, nonpartisan analysis, the paper makes no recommendations.