Food Price and Trade Policy Biases - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 368

(a) Developing countries

90

Import-competing
Exportables
Total

70

50

30

10

1965-69 1970-74 1975-79 1980-84 1985-89 1990-94 1995-99 2000-04

-10

-30

-50

(b) High-income countries plus Europe's transition economies

Import-competing
Exportables
Total

y = 2.6674x + 41.481
R 2 = 0.3576

Figure 14.6 Nominal rates of assistance to exportable, import-competing and all covered
agricultural products,a high-income, transition and developing countries, 1955 to 2004
a Covered products only. The total also includes nontradables. The straight line in the upper segment of each graph
is from an ordinary-least-squares regression based on annual NRA estimates.
Source: Anderson (2009, Ch. 1), based on estimates in Anderson and Valenzuela (2008).

In high-income countries, the growing use of somewhat decoupled, more direct
income support measures by some high-income countries, and the virtual abolition
of all support measures in Australia and New Zealand, contrast with the continu-
ing dominance of border measures of support in East Asia's high-income countries
(Figure 14.8).
Yet even when decoupled payments are included in total support estimates, trade
policy instruments (export and import taxes, subsidies or quantitative restrictions, plus
dual exchange rates) account for no less than three-fifths of agricultural NRAs glob-
ally. Hence they account for an even larger share of their global welfare cost, since trade
measures also tax consumers, and welfare costs are proportional to the square of a trade