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THREE - Political Economy of Agricultural Distortions

The Literature to Date

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2011

By
Johan F. M. Swinnen
Edited by
Kym Anderson
Johan F. M. Swinnen
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium
Kym Anderson
Affiliation:
University of Adelaide
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Summary

The 1980s and the first half of the 1990s were a very active period in the field of political economy of agricultural protection and distortions. The research was triggered by a combination of factors. First and foremost, there was the puzzling question: Why was agriculture supported in rich countries and taxed in poor countries? Second, emerging general theories of “new political economy” were coming out from the University of Chicago with the important contributions of Stigler (1971), Peltzman (1976) and Becker (1983), from the public choice school by Buchanan and Tullock (1962), and from the influential work by Downs (1957) and Olson (1965). A third factor was the arrival of new data, in particular the developing country dataset assembled as part of the World Bank study organized by Krueger, Schiff and Valdés (1988, 1991) and the high-income dataset compiled by Anderson, Hayami and Others (1986). The combination of an intriguing question, a rich set of new general theories to apply, and fascinating data induced a rich and vast literature on the political economy of agricultural distortions in the 1980s and the first part of the 1990s, with important contributions by, among others, Kym Anderson, Robert Bates, Harry de Gorter, Bruce Gardner, Yujiro Hayami, and Gordon Rausser. In our chapter for the Handbook of Agricultural Economics, Harry de Gorter and I reviewed most of this empirical and theoretical literature on the political economy of agricultural economics (de Gorter and Swinnen 2002).

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The Political Economy of Agricultural Price Distortions , pp. 81 - 104
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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