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Book The Political Economy of Agricultural and Food Policies

Download or read book The Political Economy of Agricultural and Food Policies written by Johan Swinnen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food and agriculture have been subject to heavy-handed government interventions throughout much of history and across the globe, both in developing and in developed countries. Today, more than half a trillion US dollars are spent by some governments to support farmers, while other governments impose regulations and taxes that hurt farmers. Some policies, such as price regulations and tariffs, distribute income but reduce total welfare by introducing economic distortions. Other policies, such as public investments in research, food standards, or land reforms, may increase total welfare, but these policies come also with distributional effects. These distributional effects influence the preferences of interest groups and in turn influence policy decisions. Political considerations are therefore crucial to understand how agricultural and food policies are determined, to identify the constraints within which welfare-enhancing reforms are possible (or not), and finally to understand how coalitions can be created to stimulate growth and reduce poverty.

Book The Political Economy of the 2014 2020 Common Agricultural Policy

Download or read book The Political Economy of the 2014 2020 Common Agricultural Policy written by Johan F.M. Swinnen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After five years of debates, consultations and negotiations, the European institutions reached an agreement in 2013 on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the 2014-2020 period. The outcome has major implications for the EU’s budget and farmers’ incomes, but also for Europe’s environment, its contribution to global climate change and to food security in the EU and in the world. It was decided to spend more than €400 billion during the rest of the decade on the CAP. The official claims are that the new CAP will take better account of society's expectations and lead to far-reaching changes by making subsidies fairer and ‘greener’ and making the CAP more efficient. It is also asserted that the CAP will play a key part in achieving the overall objective of promoting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. However, there is significant scepticism about these claims and disappointment with the outcome of the decision-making, the first in which the European Parliament was involved under the co-decision procedure. In contrast to earlier reforms where more substantive changes were made to the CAP, the factors that induced the policy discussions in 2008-13 and those that influenced the decision-making did not reinforce each other. On the contrary, they sometimes counteracted one another, yielding an ‘imperfect storm’ as it were, resulting in more status quo and fewer changes. This book discusses the outcome of the decision-making and the factors that influenced the policy choices and decisions. It brings together contributions from leading academics from various disciplines and policy-makers, and key participants in the process from the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Book The Political Economy of Agricultural Price Distortions

Download or read book The Political Economy of Agricultural Price Distortions written by Kym Anderson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite numerous policy reforms since the 1980s, farm product prices remain heavily distorted in both high-income and developing countries. This book seeks to improve our understanding of why societies adopted these policies, and why some but not other countries have undertaken reforms. Drawing on recent developments in political economy theories and in the generation of empirical measures of the extent of price distortions, the present volume provides both analytical narratives of the historical origins of agricultural protectionism in various parts of the world and a set of political econometric analyses aimed at explaining the patterns of distortions that have emerged over the past five decades. These new studies shed much light on the forces affecting incentives and those facing farmers in the course of national and global economic and political development. They also show how those distortions might change in the future.

Book The Political Economy of Agricultural Policy Reform in India

Download or read book The Political Economy of Agricultural Policy Reform in India written by Regina Birner and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2011 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural policy reform is one of the major challenges facing India today. Such reform is required to reduce poverty through faster agricultural growth and to promote more sustainable use of natural resources while ensuring food security. Subsidy policies that promote the use of fertilizer and of electricity for groundwater irrigation are in particular need of reform. While subsidies for these two inputs played a crucial role in achieving India's Green Revolution, they have been criticized during the past decade for benefitting large-scale farmers more than smallholders, placing a fiscal burden on the state, and having negative environmental effects. By analyzing the evolution of these input subsidy policies and examining the political processes involved in efforts to reform them, this study throws new light on the factors that have so far prevented a move toward more pro-poor and environmentally sustainable agricultural input policies in India. The authors show that electoral politics, institutional factors, and policy paradigms or belief systems all play an important role in blocking reform. They identify several policy reform options as well as political strategies that can overcome past obstacles to reform. Community-based policy solutions, new coalitions for policy reform, fresh approaches to the policy debate, innovative and consensus-oriented forms of deliberation, and effective use of research-based knowledge can all make positive contributions to Indian policy reform. The analyses and proposals presented in this study will be a valuable resource for policymakers and stakeholders concerned with the politics of agricultural development.

Book Handbook of the International Political Economy of Agriculture and Food

Download or read book Handbook of the International Political Economy of Agriculture and Food written by Alessandro Bonanno and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tackles the central question of the political and structural changes and characteristics that govern agriculture and food. Original contributions explore this highly globalized economic sector by analyzing salient geographical regions and sub

Book The political economy of reforming agricultural support policies

Download or read book The political economy of reforming agricultural support policies written by Vos, Rob and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2023-01-27 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural support policies cost more than US$800 billion per year in transfers to the farm sector worldwide. Support policies based on subsidies and trade barriers are highly distortive to markets and are also regressive as most support is provided to larger farmers. On balance, the incentives this support creates appear to increase greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. In addition, some subsidies undermine the production of more nutrient-dense commodities that are otherwise critical for the improvement of dietary outcomes. This paper first highlights that better outcomes could be achieved if even a small portion of agricultural subsidies were repurposed into investments in research and development (R&D) dedicated to productivity-enhancing and emission-reducing technologies. This would create multiple wins — mitigating global climate change, reducing poverty, increasing food security, and improving nutrition. Nonetheless, the political economy challenges to doing so are sizeable. Because current support policies are often politically popular and serve well-organized interests, reform is difficult without committed political leadership and multilateral collaboration. Using several case studies of both successful and failed changes of agricultural support policies in China, India, and the EU and the United States, we highlight lessons learned about the political economy constraints on and possibilities for reform.

Book The Political Economy of the Common Agricultural Policy

Download or read book The Political Economy of the Common Agricultural Policy written by Fernando Collantes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the balance of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy more than half a century after its birth? Does it illustrate the virtues of the European model of coordinated capitalism, as opposed to US-style liberal capitalism? Or is it an incoherent set of instruments that exert diverse negative impacts and, like Frankenstein’s monster, seems to have escaped the control of its designers? The Political Economy of the Common Agricultural Policy does not criticize the CAP from the liberal standpoint that views most public interventions in the economy as bad for efficiency and welfare. The CAP has been costly to Europeans, both as consumers and as taxpayers, and has also generated a number of negative impacts upon third countries, but these costs and impacts have been more moderate than is suggested. This book proposes that the issue with the CAP is not a generic problem of coordinating capitalism but, instead, a more specific problem of low-quality coordination. The text argues that profound reform of the European Union’s institutions and policies is required to counter the rapid rise of a more Eurosceptical state of mind but – in the case of agricultural policy – history casts serious doubts on the capacity of the European network of agriculture-related politicians to lead such a reform. This key work is essential reading for researchers, graduate students, and master’s level docents of the Common Agricultural Policy and – more broadly – European Union policy and reform.

Book The Political Economy Of Agricultural Trade And Policy

Download or read book The Political Economy Of Agricultural Trade And Policy written by Hans J Michelmann and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a descriptive analysis of the political economy of the European Community, the U.S. and Canada. It describes the structural changes and the crises in agriculture and focuses on impact of GATT on agricultural policy and trade in the post-Second World War era.

Book Agricultural Trade  Policy Reforms  and Global Food Security

Download or read book Agricultural Trade Policy Reforms and Global Food Security written by Kym Anderson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the potential for policy reform as a short-term, low-cost way to sustainably enhance global food security. It argues that reforming policies that distort food prices and trade will promote the openness needed to maximize global food availability and reduce fluctuations in international food prices. Beginning with an examination of historical trends in markets and policies, Anderson assesses the prospects for further reforms, and projects how they may develop over the next fifteen years. He pays particular attention to domestic policy changes made possible by the information technology revolution, which will complement global change to deal directly with farmer and consumer concerns.

Book The Political Economy of Biodiversity Policy Reform

Download or read book The Political Economy of Biodiversity Policy Reform written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report provides insights on the political economy of biodiversity related policy reforms. It draws on existing literature and four new case studies covering the French tax on pesticides, agricultural subsidy reform in Switzerland, EU payments to Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau to...

Book The Perfect Storm

Download or read book The Perfect Storm written by Johan F. M. Swinnen and published by CEPS. This book was released on 2008 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union survived many attempts to abolish it, and it acquired a reputation for being virtually impossible to reform in any meaningful way. Finally, during the tenure of Franz Fischler as European Commissioner for Agriculture from 1995 to 2004, the most radical reform in the policy's history was implemented. Defying the skepticism of friends and foes, Fischler managed to fundamentally transform the nature of the CAP. This book is the first to review the reforms that were implemented, to analyze how they came about, and to explain which forces made them possible. It brings together perspectives from inside and outside the policy community, including from those closely involved in the policy debates, and an interdisciplinary perspective from economists and political scientists. The authors are senior policymakers and well-respected academics. Contributors include Christophe Crombez (University of Leuven and Stanford University), Wyn Grant (University ofWarwick), Christian H.C.A. Henning (University of Kiel), Tim Josling (Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford University), Rolf Moehler (formerly of the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development of the European Commission), Alessandro Olper (University of Milan), Corrado Pirzio-Biroli (RISE Foundation), Jan Pokrivcak (Slovak Agricultural University), and Barbara Syrrakos (New School for Social Research).

Book Political Economy of Agricultural Policy Reform

Download or read book Political Economy of Agricultural Policy Reform written by Gordon C. Rausser and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Common Agricultural Policy

Download or read book The Common Agricultural Policy written by Grace Skogstad and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a unique agricultural policy worldwide. For many years, its status as the only common European Community (EC) policy governed by EC institutions put it at the heart of European integration. Today the CAP is not the only common European Union (EU) policy. Even while it remains the sole instance of a regionally integrated agricultural policy, the CAP no longer embodies the same degree of cross-national harmonization of agricultural policy among EC/EU member states that it once did. The CAP has undergone policy reforms in the past two decades and these reforms have spawned a host of questions. What has caused the CAP to reform? How path-breaking are CAP reforms? Are they consistent with founding CAP goals or do they encompass new ideas about agriculture’s place in the economy and society? And what are the consequences of agricultural policy reforms: for European farmers, consumers and taxpayers; for European ‘public goods’ such as environmental sustainability and preservation of rural communities and landscapes; and for third parties outside the EU, including the WTO? This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.

Book Policy Reform in American Agriculture

Download or read book Policy Reform in American Agriculture written by David Orden and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Students of public policy and practitioners within the farm program arena will find theis book an essential source of insight, information, and original cross-disciplinary argument."--BOOK JACKET.

Book The European Union s Common Agricultural Policy Reforms

Download or read book The European Union s Common Agricultural Policy Reforms written by Marko Lovec and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages in the controversies of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms, demonstrating how these are reiterated by mainstream theoretical approaches in the field. The reforms that the European Union’s CAP underwent during the last three decades were intended to make it less trade-distorting, more taxpayer-friendly and more able to meet the new challenges of environmental concerns and rural development/territorial cohesion. The outcome of the reforms has, however, contradicted these objectives, with the controversies being reiterated by the mainstream theoretical approaches in the field. European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy Reforms argues that these controversies are due to reductionist, rationalist and idealist assumptions with regard to the object of inquiry applied by mainstream approaches. It proposes an alternative critical approach that takes into account the role of real material factors. Critical realism is not just an alternative explanation of CAP reforms but an alternative theory of how explanations can be made, which enables readers to reflect upon and endorse the results of existing lines of research in proceeding towards deeper level theory.