Pro-poor trade policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Nicita, Alessandro; Olarreaga, Marcelo; Porto, Guido
• 署名单位: University of Geneva; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); National University of La Plata
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2014.01.001
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 252-265
• 关键词: Trade policy; Wage elasticities; poverty; Sub-Saharan Africa

摘要

This paper examines the presence of a pro-poor bias in the existing structure of protection of six Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ethiopia. Gambia, and Madagascar. We build on a simple agricultural household production model and we propose an extension to include adjustments in labor income. Our approach, which can be implemented without repeated cross-sections of household level data, suits well the data constraints in SSA It also allows us to capture the heterogeneity in trade protection at the tariff line level. The pro-poor bias indicators suggest that SSA's trade policies tend to be biased in favor of poor households, as these policies redistribute income from rich to poor households. This is because protection increases the agricultural prices of goods that are sold by African households and this effect dominates both the impacts of higher consumption prices and the strong Stolper-Samuelson effects that benefit skilled over unskilled workers. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.