A Value Chain Approach to Measuring Distortions to Incentives and Food Policy Effects (with Application to Pakistan's Grain Policy)

We develop an extended Nominal Rate of Assistance (NRA) methodology to disentangle the welfare impacts of policies for various interest groups along the value chain (to disaggregate effects within the “producer” and “consumer” umbrellas). We apply our value chain NRA methodology to the case of Pakistan’s price and trade policy. We analyse the welfare implications for various agents in the wheat-flour value chain from 2000 to 2013, a period characterized by major global price volatility and by regular adjustments of domestic policies. We find that the wheat price policy has generally benefitted flour consumers and wheat traders at the expense of wheat farmers and to a lesser extent flour millers. Our findings illustrate that the welfare implications of policies can be quite different within the “producer” and “consumer” umbrellas, which has potentially important implications for economic and political economy analyses and for the design of policies that aim to target the poorest groups along value chains.