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Abstract
For decades, agricultural price and trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa hampered
farmers’ contributions to economic growth and poverty reduction. While there has
been much policy reform over the past two decades, the injections of agricultural
development funding, together with on-going regional and global trade negotiations,
have brought distortionary policies under the spotlight once again. A key question
asked of those policies is: how much are they still reducing national economic welfare
and trade? Economy-wide models are able to address that question, but they are not
available for many poor countries. Even where they are, typically they apply to just
one particular previous year and so are unable to provide trends in effects over time.
This paper provides a partial-equilibrium alternative to economy-wide modelling, by
drawing on a modification of so-called trade restrictiveness indexes to provide
theoretically precise indicators of the trade and welfare effects of agricultural policy
distortions to producer and consumer prices over the past half-century. We generate
time series of country level indices, as well as Africa-wide aggregates. We also
provide annual commodity market indices for the region, and we provide a sense of
the relative importance of the key policy instruments used.