@article{Verma:61793,
      recid = {61793},
      author = {Verma, Monika and Valenzuela, Ernesto and Hertel, Thomas  W.},
      title = {Are The Poverty Effects of Trade Policies Invisible?},
      address = {2010},
      number = {320-2016-10251},
      series = {Selected Paper},
      pages = {52},
      year = {2010},
      abstract = {With the advent of the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda, as  well as the Millennium
Development Goals aiming to reduce  poverty by 50 percent by 2015, poverty impacts of
trade  reforms have attracted increasing attention. This has been  particularly true of
agricultural trade reform due to the  importance of food in the diets of the poor,  relatively
higher protection in agriculture, as well as the  heavy concentration of global poverty in
rural areas where  agriculture is the main source of income. Yet some in this  debate have
argued that, given the extreme volatility in  agricultural commodity markets, the
additional price and  poverty impacts due to trade liberalization might well  be
undetectable. This paper formally tests this  “invisibility hypothesis” via stochastic
simulation of a  computable general equilibrium framework. The hypothesis  test is based
on the comparison of two sets of price and  poverty distributions. The first originates
solely from the  inherent variability in global staple grains markets, while  the second
combines the effects of this inherent  variability and trade reform. Results indicate that  the
short-run impacts of trade liberalization on poverty  are not distinguishable from market
volatility in majority  of the fifteen focus countries – suggesting that the  poverty impacts
of agricultural trade liberalization may  indeed be invisible.},
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/61793},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.61793},
}