September 28, 2004
by Kym Anderson (World Bank, CEPR
and University of Adelaide), Richard Damania (University of
Adelaide) and
Lee Ann Jackson (WTO Secretariat, Geneva)
ABSTRACT
Anderson, Damania, and Jackson
develop a common-agency lobbying model to help understand why
North America and the European Union have adopted such different
policies toward genetically modified (GM) food. Their results
show that when firms (in this case farmers) lobby policymakers
to influence standards, and consumers and environmentalists care
about the choice of standard, it is possible that increased
competition from abroad can lead to strategic incentives to
raise standards, not just lower them as shown in earlier models.
The authors show that differences in comparative advantage in
the adoption of GM crops may be sufficient to explain the
trans-Atlantic difference in GM policies. On the one hand,
farmers in a country with a comparative advantage in GM
technology can gain a strategic cost advantage by lobbying for
lax controls on GM production and use at home and abroad. On the
other hand, when faced with greater competition, the optimal
response of farmers in countries with a comparative disadvantage
in GM adoption may be to lobby for more-stringent GM standards.
So it is rational for producers in the European Union (whose
relatively small farms would enjoy less gains from the new
biotechnology than broad-acre American farms) to reject GM
technology if that enables them and consumer and environmental
lobbyists to argue for restraints on imports from GM-adopting
countries. This theoretical proposition is supported by
numerical results from a global general equilibrium model of GM
adoption in America with and without an EU moratorium.
This paper — a product of the Trade Team, Development Research
Group — is part of a larger effort in the group to understand
the economic implications of standards and technology policies
in a multilateral trading environment.
Full text in PDF format:
http://econ.worldbank.org/files/38347_wps3395.pdf |