Estimates of Distortions to Agricultural Incentives

The World Bank research project on "Distortions to Agricultural Incentives" has produced a core database of Nominal Rates of Assistance to producers, or NRAs, together with a set of Consumer Tax Equivalents, or CTEs, for farm products and a set of Relative Rates of Assistance to farmers in 75 focus countries. The core database provides nominal rates of assistance estimates for the main individual commodities that together account for about 70 percent of the value of farm production in those countries, as well as guesstimates of the NRA for the 30 percent of farm production not covered. Also estimated is the NRA for non-agricultural tradables so as to compute a relative rate of assistance. Consumer tax equivalents are also provided for the covered products in each focus country, along with value of production and consumption at undistorted prices and of trade for each covered product and for non-covered farm products. The supplementary database on trade and welfare reduction indexes provides estimates of welfare and trade reduction indexes for each of the 75 countries.