Quantifying the Economy-Wide Effects of Agricultural Policies

This paper presents a progress report on the Economics and Statistics Department's applied general equilibrium model -- the WALRAS model. This model has been developed with the explicit objective of quantifying the economy-wide effects of agricultural policies in OECD countries. The common specification of the model for the major OECD agricultural trading countries/regions (Australia, Canada, EEC, Japan, New Zealand and the United States) is described in detail. Results are presented for some preliminary simulations of the effects of removing the 1979-81 levels of agricultural assistance in these countries/regions. The initial results relate only to unilateral liberalisation experiments with the unlinked country/region models, with no account being taken of feedback effects through changes in world agricultural prices and trade volumes ...