1. IO Consortium for Measuring Agricultural Protection
David Laborde, Will Martin & Simla Tokgoz
World Bank
29 June 2017

2. Ag-Incentives Consortium
Importance of measuring agricultural distortions
Need for a consortium
Approaches and key results
Value to the Bank

3. Importance of Measuring Distortions
Agricultural trade distortions have big impacts
On farm incomes
On consumer costs
On world prices
Small sector but very high distortions
And costly variance in distortions
Unless we can measure
It’s hard to recommend policy reforms
It’s difficult to negotiate

4. Data needs Would like to have near-global coverage
Certainly need coverage of the big countries
To capture impacts on world prices
Want broad coverage of smaller, poor countries
Where trade distortions may have big impacts on poverty
Need coverage of many commodities
And over time

5. Need for a Consortium

6. Public good under-provided
Only one study provided near-global measures of agricultural distortions
Kym Anderson project at World Bank
covered
What is needed is regularly updated information
Like the OECD Monitoring work
Too big a task for any one person or organization

7. Consortium possibilities
OECD coverage expanding
Now OECD plus major developing countries
Inter-American Development Bank
Agrimonitor project
FAO-MAFAP
Coverage of important developing countries
World Bank
Three South Asia studies plus ongoing monitoring
IFPRI
Hosting website, policy analyses

8. Ag-Incentives Consortium

9. Ag-Incentives Consortium
Currently
FAO-MAFAP, Inter-American Development Bank, IFPRI, OECD and the World Bank
Approaches
creation of a community of practice
harmonization & consolidation of database
making information publicly available

10. Initial release in 2017 One measure Around 80 countries
Nominal rate of protection (NRP)
Around 80 countries
Released through website
With regular updates

11. Approaches and key results

12. Measurement approach
Much agricultural support is provided in non-transparent ways
Quotas, licences, tariff-rate-quotas, bans
Not visible like ad valorem tariffs
Standard response is to use approaches like comparisons of domestic and international prices
Requires very careful measurement

13. Current measure 𝑁𝑅𝑃=( 𝑃𝑃 𝑅𝑃 −1)*100 Nominal Rate of Protection (NRP)
𝑁𝑅𝑃=( 𝑃𝑃 𝑅𝑃 −1)*100
PP = producer price & RP = reference price
A tariff equivalent, distinct from a PSE
Need measures of prices, adjusted to ensure comparability of product & location
Volumes of production to allow aggregation
Exchange rates

14. Process Commitment to 1 yearly update Data collection twice a year
Consolidated database (public, SQL, Tableau Viz)
Data processing and quality check
[Python, GAMS]
Data collection with IOs
(Excel Workbooks)
Commitment to 1 yearly update
Data collection twice a year
Online data documentation
Harmonization
Exchange rate
Cross Checks
Internal
external
Data elimination
metadata

15. Extension to domestic support
Agreed in principle to extend from NRP to NRA
Likely to follow OECD approach
But as we refine the approach, an excellent time to discuss

16. 15 year dynamics

17. Nominal Rate of Protection in Agriculture: A changing Landscape
Anderson and Valenzuela (2008)

18. Comparison with other measures
Nominal Rate of Protection:
Benefit: includes all forms of protection, incl NTBs
Limitation: policy interventions not always identified
No bilateral NRP
Hard to identify impacts of tariff preferences
Complementary with other data sources
WTO/UNCTAD tariff measures
GTAP measures
Kee et al measures of tariffs & NTBs

19. Bank studies on South Asia

20. South Asia studies, NRP

21. Value for the Bank

22. Country policy dialogue
If your country is included in the database
Data provide a valuable summary of policies
And impacts for individual commodities & overall
Allow comparison with other countries
If your country is not in the database
Consider using the PSE/NRP methodology
Powerful & well understood
And contributing data to this global public good

23. Global policy discussions
Valuable for monitoring policy developments
Understanding impacts of rich country policies on poor countries
And poor country policies on their own farmers and consumers

24.
Consortium approach to providing this vitally needed global information
Regular contributions from OECD, IADB, FAO-MAFAP
Contributions from World Bank, IFPRI
Well-defined procedures, regularly updated
Valuable for policy dialogue
Analysis of policies– and built-in comparison with others
World Bank hugely important
Both as user and contributor