Relative rates of protection

Relative rate of assistance to agriculture, excluding decoupled payments, 1956 to 2004 (percent)

“The Relative Rate of Assistance is calculated as RRA = 100[(100+NRAag)/(100+NRAnonag) – 1], where NRAagt and NRAnonagt are the average percentage Nominal Rates of Assistance for the tradable parts of the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors, respectively.”

From: Kym Anderson and Tim Josling.

Australia and New Zealand have low relative rates of agricultural to non-agricultural protection because both had protection in manufacturing exceeding that in agriculture before they “unilaterally moved to virtually free markets in farm and non-farm goods.” European, Japanese and Korean protection is heavily concentrated in the agricultural sector. And America? It appears to protect its agricultural and non-agricultural sectors evenhandedly.

The shortcoming of the graph is that it depicts only relative protection. Visualizing both absolute and relative protection in the same figure would be very informative, though a bit difficult to construct.

4 thoughts on “Relative rates of protection

  1. Jonathan

    They look okay on my browser. Click the link and scroll down a bit to see the original graph at full size.

  2. Mike

    I thought it might be my resolution (1920×1200) or browser settings (I still use IE), but changing those did not alleviate the problem. This has happened with previous posts. The picture above is coming out as 450×281 while the original is 768×480.

    Are you resizing them?

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