تاثیر اصلاح تجارت شکر اتحادیه اروپا بر خانواده های فقیر در کشورهای در حال توسعه: یک تحلیل تعادل عمومی

We use a modified version of the applied general equilibrium model GTAP, called GTAPMH, to evaluate the impact of a reduction in the EU's support price for sugar on income distribution of African households. For LDC countries, non-ACP but participant in the EBA initiative a +2% change is indicated in term of income generation across all ten social strata identified within GTAPMH framework, with positive percentage changes in supply prices at household level of endowment commodities, and positive percentage changes in price indices for private household expenditures. The big losers will be those countries that would no longer be able to compete at an international level as a result of the lost preferences.

This article simulates the EU sugar trade reform within an applied general equilibrium (AGE), global trade model called GTAPMH and it analyses the effects of the reform on poverty incidence in developing countries. We developed GTAPMH from the standard GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project) database and model1 by adding data and economic behavior for ten household groups in 29 countries. Our household data are from the World Bank income and expenditure quintile distribution (Africa Household Survey databank, 2006). The impact of reforms to sugar sector policies on world market conditions and on developing countries has been extensively studied in the literature, but none of the scenarios deployed are exactly comparable to this study. Devadoss and Kropf (1996) estimated that the world price would increase by 8.83% due to full implementation of the Uruguay Round. Wohlgenant's (1999) simulations indicate that the world raw sugar price could increase 43.2% with complete trade liberalization; 10% with complete trade liberalization in developed countries; and 17% with complete trade liberalization in major developing countries. Elbehri, Hertel, Ingco, and Pearson (2000) show that EU sugar import liberalization has a much greater impact on world sugar trade than USA sugar liberalization. Beghin et al. (2003) estimated that USA sugar trade liberalization would cause world raw sugar prices to increase by 13.2%. Koo (2002) stressed that the Caribbean port price would have increased by 32.8% in 2004 compared to the base scenario if USA barriers were removed; by 21.6% if EU barriers were removed; and by 68.2% if barriers in both the USA and EU were removed simultaneously. Moreover, Beghin et al. in their study show that even with less than complete pass-through of sugar cost savings, consumers would benefit relative to losses incurred by producers and processors, and total net welfare gains would be large. Also Koo calculates welfare effects of the policies and indicates that the USA sugar industry may be able to survive if both USA and EU liberalize their sugar trade, but not if the USA alone liberalizes trade.

The contribution of this work is the inclusion of multiple households to replace the single private household of the standard GTAP model, whilst ensuring consistency between the micro-structure and the macro-model. GTAPMH data were derived from the standard GTAP data by allocating regional factor ownership, income and expenditure (by commodity) to ten household categories, using shares from the World Bank household surveys. Thus, GTAPMH data are consistent with the standard GTAP data; in fact, when GTAPMH data are aggregated across the ten household strata they yield the standard GTAP data. This consistency means that the poverty evaluation of the included households is consistent with the underlying macro-results. As such, this improvement greatly enhances the previous approach of post-simulation analysis, where the micro-level data were not directly incorporated in the global model. The important contribution is that the standard GTAP model is brought to a more advanced and global level of micro–macro synthesis. The differentiation of income across social strata permits the evaluation of poverty effects, as each household's poverty may be measured through its income. Other than in income level, each household category is also differentiated in the shares of endowments it owns and the bundle of commodities it consumes. This means that even if all households that belong to the agricultural rural strata have at least 95% of income coming from agricultural profits, this income may contain different levels of returns to labour, land and capital between two households. For example, the richer households tend to earn most of their agricultural profits in the form of land and capital rents, while the poorer ones receive most of their agricultural profits in the form of return to labour. The most interesting insight of this study was to carry the global trade analysis down to the household micro-economic effects level. Overall the impact of the EU sugar trade reform regime on poverty would be negative, but not uniform across regions, or social strata within a region. While some households would gain, others would lose. This result strengthens Winters, McCulloch, and McKay (2004) evidence asserting that “poorer households may be less able than richer ones to protect themselves against adverse effects or to take advantages of positive opportunities created by policy reforms” (Winters et al., 2004, p. 107).