During the 1960s and 1970s mostdeveloping countries imposed anti-agricultural policies,while many high-income countries restricted agriculturalimports and subsidized their farmers. Both sets of policiesinhibited economic growth and poverty alleviation indeveloping countries, while doing little to assist smallfarmers in high-income countries. Since the 1980s, however,many developing countries began to reduce theanti-agricultural bias of sectoral policies, and from theearly 1990s the European Union began to move away from pricesupports to more-direct forms of farm income payments. Thispaper summarizes a forthcoming book that seeks to explainthis evolving pattern of distortions to incentivesconceptually and econometrically by making use of newpolitical economy theory and a new globally comprehensiveand consistent set of estimates of the changing extent ofannual distortions over the past half-century. Thedistortion estimates involve more than 70 products thatcover around 70 percent of the value of agricultural outputin each of 75 countries that together account for over 90percent of the global economy, and they expose thecontribution of the various policy instruments (both farmand non-farm) to the net distortion to farmer incentives.Such a widespread coverage of countries, products, years andpolicy instruments has allowed this collection of studies totest a wide range of hypotheses suggested by the newpolitical economy literature, including the importance ofinstitutions. As a set it sheds much new light on theunderlying forces that have affected incentives facingfarmers in the course of national and global economic andpolitical development, and hence on how those distortionsmight change in the future - or be changed by concertedactions to offset political pressures from traditionallypowerful vested interests.
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