The measurement of agricultural price distortion in developing countries

Abstract

The most common means of measuring agricultural price distortion in less‐developed countries has been through the estimation of variously‐defined nominal protection coefficients. The objectives of this article are: (a) to demonstrate that the coefficients which have been employed are inadequate for measuring price distortion; (b) to develop a suitable method for measuring distortion at each point on domestic marketing chains; and (c) to demonstrate, using the example of maize in Kenya, the potential magnitude and direction of the differences between the conventional coefficients and the distortion coefficients developed in the article.