Scope for world trade reform to ease Asian poverty and inequality

For decades, earnings from farming in many Asian and other developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban, anti-agricultural bias in own-country sectoral and trade policies as well as by governments of richer countries favouring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduced national and global economic welfare, inhibited economic growth, and added to inequality and poverty because no fewer than three-quarters of the world’s billion poorest people still depend directly or indirectly on farming for their livelihood (World Bank, 2007).

Related Subject(s): Economic and Social Development