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Abstract
This survey provides a structured picture of 40 years of literature which uses welfare economic tools to judge agricultural
policy. Challenges and developments of normative agricultural policy analysis are discussed in an easily accessible graphical
framework. It is shown how the literature has gone from examining a very small discrete set of simple policies to a much
broader (often continuous) set of policies that combine policy instruments simultaneously. The importance of the Pareto
criterion, used to explore the limits of how government can affect welfare, is revealed. Moreover, given the importance of
the objective of income redistribution in agricultural policy, agricultural economists have often departed from the purely
efficiency-oriented tradition in economics. It is shown that they have tried to incorporate equity considerations by either
adding these criteria as constraints to the social welfare function, or directly incorporating these criteria in the functional form
of the social welfare function.