发展中国家的农业贸易改革与减轻贫困

Agricultural trade reform and poverty reduction in developing countries Kym Anderson University of Adelaide, CEPR and Development Research Group, World Bank Washington DC 20433 USA Phone +1 202 473 3387 Fax +1 202 522 1159 kanderson@worldbank.org World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3396, September 2004 The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org. Thanks are due to university seminar participants in Melbourne, Yale and Trinity College Dublin (TCD) for helpful comments and to the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, IIIS at TCD and the University of Adelaide for financial support. Forthcoming in International Trade and Development: Essays in Honour of Peter Lloyd, edited by S. Jayasuriya and P.J. Lloyd, London: Edward Elgar, 2004.  2 Abstract This paper offers an economic assessment of the opportunities and challenges provided by the WTO's Doha Development Agenda, particularly through agricultural trade liberalization, for low-income countries seeking to trade their way out of poverty. After discussing links between poverty, economic growth and trade, it reports modeling results showing that farm product markets remain the most costly of all goods market distortions in world trade. It focuses on what such reform might mean for developing countries both without and with their involvement in the multilateral trade negotiations. What becomes clear is that if those countries want to maximize their benefits from the Doha round, they need also to free up their own domestic product and factor markets so their farmers are better able to take advantage of new market opportunities abroad. Other concerns of low-income countries about farm trade reform also are addressed: whether there would be losses associated with tariff preference erosion, whether food-importing countries would suffer from higher food prices in international markets, whether China's WTO accession will provide an example of trade reform aggravating poverty via cuts in prices received by Chinese farmers, and the impact on food security and poverty alleviation. Keywords: WTO, agricultural protection, trade liberalization, poverty alleviation JEL classification: F13, F15, F17, Q17  Agricultural trade reform and poverty reduction in developing countries Kym Anderson The first of the eight Millennium Development Goals articulated at the UN General Assembly in 2000 was to halve by 2015 the proportion of people in absolute poverty, that is, those living on less than US$1 per day and suffering from hunger. Throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the number of people in the world that were poverty stricken had been increasing almost continually (Bouguignon and Morrisson 2002). Since the late 1970s, however, the number has declined by more than 200 million (Sala-i-Martin 2002). Remarkable though that recent achievement has been in such a short period, the World Bank estimates that there were still as many as one in five people, or 1.2 billion, below that poverty line in 2000 (e.g., Collier and Dollar 2002, Figure 3).1 Efforts to alleviate poverty for those remaining poor people, if they are to be successful, need to be based on a clear understanding of the reasons behind successful alleviation to date. The evidence presented by Sala-i-Martin suggests aggregate economic growth differences have been largely responsible for the differences in poverty alleviation across regions, a finding supported by numerous other studies (e.g., Dollar and Kraay 2002). Initiatives that boost economic growth are therefore likely to be helpful in the fight against absolute poverty. Trade liberalization is such an initiative that tends to boost economic growth.2 But it also alters relative product prices, which in turn affect factor prices (Lloyd 2000; Ruffin and Jones 1977, 2004). Hence its net effects on poverty and hunger reduction depend also on the signs of those domestic product price changes and how 1 Sala-i-Martin's data suggest the number has fallen to 350 million, at least in 1985 PPP terms. Even if that lower figure were to be correct, it is an unacceptable number of people in extreme poverty. 2 The link between openness and economic growth, while not completely unambiguous and universal, is strong, and there is no evidence that openness is harmful to growth (see the discussion in McCulloch, Winters and Cirera 2001, Ch. 2). Trade's impact on growth can be much reduced in the absence of liberal domestic markets, macro stability, and appropriate institutions and infrastructure, however, since those are all necessary to enable producers to respond to changes in international market signals (Hoekman et al. 2001). For a comprehensive survey of the links between trade, growth and poverty, see Berg and Krueger (2002). The theory is also covered succinctly in Winters (2002) while a survey of the empirical evidence (at least for own-country liberalization) is available in Winters, McCulloch and McKay (2002).  2 they affect domestic factor prices, on the price and quantity of food available for consumption, and hence on real individual and household incomes. If the price changes (whether due to own-country reforms and/or those of other countries) are pro-poor, then they will tend to reinforce any positive growth effects of trade reform on the poor, although the outcome depends also on the extent to which changes in border measures and complementary domestic policies do the following: