There is widespread concern that the Uruguay Round may reduce the welfare of developing countries through its effect on world agricultural prices. Reduced agricultural price distortions among major supplying nations are predicted to increase basic food prices and decrease some important export prices such as those for coffee and cotton. It appears that raising food prices paid by food importers must be bad for them, while reducing world coffee and cotton prices appears bad for exporters of those products. Appearances may be deceiving, however, since theory shows that a distortion effect operates alongside the standard terms of trade effect. I report here distortion effects which are many times larger" than terms of trade effects in an analysis of the Uruguay Round's impact on 9 agricultural economies. I deploy a simple Computable General Equilibrium model. The 9 developing economies are distorted by domestic agricultural distortions in 15 markets, along with hundreds of 4 digit nonagricultural tariffs and quotas. In 3 of 9 countries, the distortion effect reverses the impact of the terms of trade effect. In 2 other countries the distortion effect raises a trivial terms of trade effect up to around 1% of national income.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
5923.
Length: Date of creation: Feb 1997 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5923
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Find related papers by JEL classification: F13 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Country and Industry Studies of Trade
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Anderson, James E & Bannister, Geoffrey J & Neary, J Peter, 1995.
"Domestic Distortions and International Trade,"
International Economic Review,
Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 36(1), pages 139-57, February.
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