The Normative Analysis of Agricultural Policy: A General Framework and Review

The paper provides a general framework of normative agricultural policy analysis within which it is possible to unify forty years of literature. It is shown that the literature has gone from examining a very small set of simple policies to a much broader set of policies that combine policy instruments simultaneously. In ranking alternative policies agricultural economists have tried to consider distributive equity. While at a glance it may seem that many different methods have been used to consider distributive equity, we show that in general all these methods can be traced back to three alternative methods based on welfarism and Pareto efficiency.