Judging agricultural policies: a survey

Abstract

This survey provides a structured picture of 40 years of literature which uses welfare economic tools to judge agricultural policy. Challenges and developments of normative agricultural policy analysis are discussed in an easily accessible graphical framework. It is shown how the literature has gone from examining a very small discrete set of simple policies to a much broader (often continuous) set of policies that combine policy instruments simultaneously. The importance of the Pareto criterion, used to explore the limits of how government can affect welfare, is revealed. Moreover, given the importance of the objective of income redistribution in agricultural policy, agricultural economists have often departed from the purely efficiency‐oriented tradition in economics. It is shown that they have tried to incorporate equity considerations by either adding these criteria as constraints to the social welfare function, or directly incorporating these criteria in the functional form of the social welfare function.

The Fischler Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and Agricultural Land Prices

“…First, it contradicts the objectives of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), particularly the objective of the most recent reforms, to target "support exclusively to active farmers" (European Commission, 2010, p. 3). Second, whether the reform increased the transfer efficiency, defined as the ratio between benefits of the targeted group and costs to all other groups (Josling, 1974;Gardner, 1983;Bullock and Salhofer, 2003), of the CAP remains ambiguous. On the one hand, decoupled payments are clearly less distortionary than coupled payments (OECD 2004).…”

Simulating the Effects of Supply and Demand Elasticities on Political-Economic Equilibrium

“…Since the demand curve slopes downward, the greater production leads to a bigger distortional wedge, which must grow because the consumer price must drop to increase consumption. Redistributive efficiency can also be illustrated in welfare-space, with u 1 and u 2 on the axes, as in figure 2, which reflects elements of , Bullock (1994Bullock ( , 1995Bullock ( , 1996, and Bullock and Salhofer (2003). The curves are surplus transformation curves, introduced by Josling (1974).…”

Agricultural Distortions and Economic Growth in Southern Africa: Evidence from Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe (1970-2011)

“…One of the first innovations was the introduction of the neoclassical approach to agriculture and food policy analysis (Bullock and Salhofer) [1]. The bedrock of neoclassical agricultural policy analysis involved understanding agriculture and food policies as the use of various "instruments" to shift the price incentives of various producer and consumer groups.…”