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.