Abstract
During an international crisis securing the domestic supply of food is very important. Swedish agricultural policy during the postwar period provides a good example of how instrumental distortions (distortions that are deliberate policy measures) may be introduced into an economy to protect it against loss of the possibility of importing food. The reasoning developed presently is of relevance also for a number of other Western countries. The agricultural sector has for different reasons been sheltered from international competition (e.g., in order to secure the national provision of foodstuffs, to guarantee ‘fair’ incomes for the farmers or to reduce the exodus of workers from the primary sector when the rest of the economy cannot absorb them).
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Literature
The theory employed in the present chapter is presented in:
Batra, Raveendra N. (1973), Studies in the Pure Theory of International Trade. Macmillan, London.
Bhagwati, Jagdish N. Panagariya, A. and Srinivasan, T. N. (1998), Lectures on International Trade (2nd edn). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, ch. 28.
Chacholiades, Miltiades (1978), International Trade and Policy. McGraw-Hill, Koga-kusha, Tokyo.
Magee, Stephen P. (1976), International Trade and Distortions in Factor Markets. Marcel Dekker, New York.
The historical background to Swedish agricultural policy is given in:
Hedlund, Stefan and Lundahl, Mats (1986), ‘Emergency Considerations in Swedish Agriculture: A Retrospective Look’, European Review of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 13.
Surveys of the principal problems of Swedish agriculture are available in:
Bolin, Olof, Meyerson, Per-Martin and Ståhl, Ingemar, with contributions by Brorsson, Kjell-Åke, Haraldsson, Ingemar and Rabinowicz, Ewa (1986), The Political Economy of the Food Sector: The Case of Sweden. SNS, Stockholm.
Rabinowicz, Ewa (1992), ‘Agricultural Policy: Old Wine in New Bottles’, in Bourdet, Yves (ed.), Internationalization, Market Power and Consumer Welfare. Routledge, London and New York.
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© 2002 Hans C. Blomqvist and Mats Lundahl
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Blomqvist, H.C., Lundahl, M. (2002). Instrumental Distortions: Swedish Agricultural Policy. In: The Distorted Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403914347_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403914347_5
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