The Poverty Impacts of Global Commodity Trade Liberalization
This paper examines the poverty impacts of global merchandise trade reform by looking at a wide range of developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Overall, the authors find that trade reform tends to reduce poverty primarily through t...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/650761468313810066/The-poverty-impacts-of-global-commodity-trade-liberalization http://hdl.handle.net/10986/28157 |
| Summary: | This paper examines the poverty impacts
of global merchandise trade reform by looking at a wide
range of developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin
America. Overall, the authors find that trade reform tends
to reduce poverty primarily through the inclusion of
agricultural components. The majority of developing country
sample experiences small poverty increases from
non-agricultural reforms. The authors explore the relative
poverty-friendliness of agricultural trade reforms in
detail, examining the differential impacts on real after-tax
factor returns of agricultural versus non-agricultural
reforms. This analysis is extended to the distribution of
households by looking at stratum-specific poverty changes.
The author's findings indicate that the more favorable
impacts of agricultural reforms are driven by increased
returns to peasant farm households' labor as well as
higher returns for unskilled wage labor. Finally, the
authors examine the commodity-specific poverty impacts of
trade reform for this sample of countries. The authors find
that liberalization of food grains and other processed foods
represent the largest contributions to poverty reduction.
More specifically, it is tariff reform in these commodity
markets that dominates the poverty increasing impacts of
wealthy country subsidy removal. |
|---|