Piero Conforti

Liberalizing trade under structural constraints in developing countries: a general equilibrium analysis of Tanzania.

The paper uses a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of Tanzania, that includes considerable factor disaggregation and household detail, to explore the impact of trade liberalization on growth and poverty alleviation. The focus is on the impact of trade liberalization policies under different structural constraints, such as large marketing margins between producers and the market. The first major conclusion that obtains from the empirical results is that the nature of the macroeconomic and sectoral market adjustme nt makes a large difference on the results of the liberalization scenario. In particular, the functioning of the labor market appears to make for significant differences in the outcome of tariff cuts. A closure that seems empirically relevant to Tanzania is adopted and several policy scenarios are run. The policy that seems to be the most appropriate for poverty reduction is the one where marketing margins decrease. By contrast, the scenario that assumes significant further unilateral trade liberalization does not seem to produce significant GDP changes, nor does it produce significant changes in household welfare, despite the large degree of liberalizatio n assumed. Hence trade liberalization appears not to be a panacea for growth and poverty alleviation in Tanzania without supply side interventions.

Scaling-up community-driven development. Evidence from the Philippines

Community-driven development programmes are an increasingly common component of poverty reduction strategies. Most have been on a small-scale so far, but efforts are being made to scale successful experiences up to the country level. This article quantifies the impact of the community-driven ‘farming system development’ (FSD) adopted by the Philippine government in selected rice-producing agrarian communities and simulates the potential effects of scaling FSD up to the country level using a general equilibrium framework. Results show that the FSD approach could be an effective poverty reduction strategy, instigating poor farmers to diversify towards nontraditional crops and the rice processing industry to benefit from lower prices; however, existing rice import quotas severely constraint the size of such potential benefits.

L’uso dei future e delle opzioni per assicurare i rischi di prezzo delle importazioni di grano dei paesi a basso reddito deficitari di alimenti

The paper considers the problem of insuring the price risks of wheat imports of low income food deficit countries (LIFDCs), as a way to insure one part of their external commodity risks, and a contribution to their sustainable development. Econometric analysis of wheat import unit values of LIFCDs suggests that they are closely related to international wheat export reference prices. These in turn are closely related to the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) futures prices, suggesting that CBOT is a good hedging market for all wheat importing countries. Simulations for a set of LIFDCs that account for a large share of the LIFDC wheat imports are conducted for the periods 1995-2002 and 1986-2002 with actual CBOT futures nd options data to explore the feasibility of hedging monthly wheat imports of LIFDCs. It is shown that rules based on futures as well as options provide considerable opportunities for hedging. It is also shown that pooling the price risks of all countries together provides superior hedging opportunity. This suggests that multilateral arrangements to hedge LIFDC cereal import price risks maybe viable, and maybe a crucial contributor to overall sustainable development strategies.