The regional books that provideddetailed estimates of distortion in developing economies areall country focused. While they include commodity detailsfor their particular country, they are not able to providean overview for developing countries or high-incomecountries as a group, or for the world as a whole. Thispaper seeks to fill this gap. The paper begins by describingthe overall project's coverage of 30 major commoditiesand their importance in regional and global agriculturalproduction and trade. It then summarizes the nominal ratesof assistance and consumer tax equivalents for twelve keycovered products, together with their gross subsidy/taxequivalents in constant dollars. The paper then examinesseven largely non-traded food staples that are nonethelessimportant food items for poor people in low-incomecountries. Even though those commodities are only a smallshare of global production and exports of farm products,they can be crucial to the food security of large segmentsof developing country societies. The agriculturaldistortions database lends itself to placing the policiesaffecting (or ignoring) those products in a broaderperspective. The final part of the paper provides anothernew perspective on the project's database. It seeks toshed light on how relatively distorted are the variouscommodity markets from the viewpoint of global trade orwelfare restrictiveness. This analysis draws on the theoryoutlined in the previous chapter, but switches the focusfrom countries to products.
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