{"id":379,"date":"2003-09-19T03:34:34","date_gmt":"2003-09-19T11:34:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2003\/09\/19\/do-argicultural-subsidies-matter-much\/"},"modified":"2003-09-19T03:34:34","modified_gmt":"2003-09-19T11:34:34","slug":"do-argicultural-subsidies-matter-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=379","title":{"rendered":"Do argicultural subsidies matter much?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s lots of fuss in the media about agricultural subsidies… but over at TomPaine.com<\/a>, in his weekly critique of newspaper stories, economist Dean Baker disagrees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For example, the September 9th Times piece (which is a lengthy front-page article that also takes up most of an inside page) quotes a vice-president of the World Bank as saying that “reducing these barriers and removing agricultural subsidies is one of the most important things that rich nations can do for millions of people to escape poverty.”<\/p>\n

This claim is not supported by research findings. For example, a recent World Bank study found that if rich nations removed all subsidies and barriers affecting merchandise trade (not just agricultural goods), it would raise income in poor countries by just 0.6 percent. This means that if a country had a per capita GDP of $1,000 at present, its income would rise to $1,006 when the full impact of this trade liberalization was felt.<\/p>\n

The World Bank’s research actually shows that developing countries would gain far more if rich nations abandoned their efforts to impose U.S.-style patent and copyright protection. While agricultural barriers have been a frequent topic in recent news stories on trade, the much larger economic impact of patent and copyright protection has been completely ignored (see “The Relative Impact of Trade Liberalization on Developing Countries<\/a>“).<\/div>\n

.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s lots of fuss in the media about agricultural subsidies… but over at TomPaine.com, in his weekly critique of newspaper stories, economist Dean Baker disagrees. For example, the September 9th Times piece (which is a lengthy front-page article that also … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-site-and-admin-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}