The Agrarian Economies Of Central And Eastern Europe And The Commonwealth Of Independent States

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The vast majority of the world's poorest households depend on farming for their livelihood. During the 1960s and 1970s, most developing countries imposed pro-urban and anti-agricultural policies, while many high-income countries restricted agricultural imports and subsidized their farmers. Both sets of policies inhibited economic growth and poverty alleviation in developing countries. Although progress has been made over the past two decades to reduce those policy biases, many trade- and welfare-reducing price distortions remain between agriculture and other sectors as well as within the agricultural sector of both rich and poor countries. Comprehensive empirical studies of the disarray in world agricultural markets first appeared approximately 20 years ago. Since then the OECD has provided estimates each year of market distortions in high-income countries, but there has been no comparable estimates for the world's developing countries. This volume is the first in a series (other volumes cover Africa, Asia, and Latin America) that not only fill that void for recent years but extend the estimates in a consistent and comparable way back in time--and provide analytical narratives for scores of countries that shed light on the evolving nature and extent of policy interventions over the past half-century. 'Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Europe's Transition Economies' provides an overview of the evolution of distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price and trade policies in the economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia that are transitioning away from central planning. The book includes country and subregional studies of the ten transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe that joined the European Union in 2004 or 2007, of seven other large member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and of Turkey. Together these countries comprise over 90 percent of the Europe and Central Asia region's population and GDP. Sectoral, trade, and exchange rate policies in the region have changed greatly since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, but price distortions remain. The new empirical indicators in these country studies provide a strong evidence-based foundation for evaluating policy options in the years ahead.

"Many of the irrigation systems in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have been shut down because of problems related to organizational requirements, the supply of energy, land ownership, profitability, cost, agricultural marketing problems, and external and internal strife." Improving the relative inefficiency of agriculture and protection of the natural environment are two of the most important challenges facing the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States and Central and Eastern Europe. This volume documents the development experience in rural, natural resources and environment projects, and research and technical assistance activities in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Region. This experience has varied widely between sectors and between countries. However, certain lessons learned should inform future activities in the same sectors. Some of the most important findings for these economies include the importance of institutional capacity to sustain reforms, the value of facilitating local participation to increase the sustainability of development programs, and the requirements for fostering a dialog between stakeholders, including the private sector.

This report, based on an overview of recent regional developments, summarizes the revised World Bank assistance strategy for rural development in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region. The rural sector includes the people; the economic development activities; the institutional, economic, and social infrastructure; and the natural resources of rural areas, and is thus not confined to agricultural alone. But this report focuses principally on Bank activities that support rural development and policy reforms designed to improve well-being and increase the competitiveness of all rural enterprises. Natural resources and social issues are addressed separately. Chapter 2 looks at the reform process in the rural sector, particularly the increasing differentiation between Central Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Chapter 3 examines the Bank's strategy for rural development as manifested in its Country Assistance Strategies (CAS) and existing loan portfolio in ECA countries. Chapter 3 ends by discussing the Bank's achievement targets and components of its regional strategy.

This book provides an in-depth look at Europe's changing agricultural and food markets, focusing on the impacts of recent policy reforms, enlargement of the European Union (EU), and trade liberalisation. The papers included in this book braid together four important themes in European agriculture and food markets: the impacts of EU enlargement on productivity growth and catching up in the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), the influence of food quality standards on market structures in the CEECs and on trade, the impacts of common agricultural policy (CAP) reforms on EU and world markets, and the costs of adjusting to CAP reforms in specific sectors. The insights provided in these papers into the empirical interactions between policies, institutions, and market outcomes, both domestically and internationally, are valuable to policy makers and researchers interested in the future of European agriculture.

The year 2016 marks the 25th anniversary of the official inauguration of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a free association of sovereign states comprised of Russia and 11 other republics that were formerly part of the Soviet Union (The CIS--Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine; the South Caucasus--Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia plus disconnected Abkhazia and South Ossetia; and Central Asia--Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Although this loose association of states may not exist as a fixed-entity on the globe, it is believed that this bloc of countries will continue to build upon the various separate regions in the former Soviet space in the coming decade. Despite major differences country-to-country, groups within each state share many common economic, political, and cultural characteristics, which many hope will fade with the passing of those generations that remember the common state. In this context, the Russian Federation holds a unique position in the Euro-Pacific area. Separate, distinct, but still bordering these regions and related to all of them to differing degrees, in the 2010s Russia will step up efforts to become an independent center of gravity in Northern Eurasia. Leaning on its CIS allies and partners, Moscow is willing to fortify its stance vis-à-vis its geopolitical competitors--the European Union in the west, and China in the east. Nevertheless, the combination of factors that determined the plunge in the economy of the CIS since the second quarter of 2015 persists today. These factors included the sharp fall in commodities prices, restrictions on access to international capital markets due to sanctions against Russia and a deceleration in China, which is the region's main trading partner. Although economic conditions in most of the CIS economies are challenging, differences in growth dynamics persist. Oil and gas exporting countries, namely Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan, are seeing economic conditions deteriorating rapidly because of the sharp fall in energy prices. Meanwhile, most of the labor-exporting countries (Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Tajikistan) are seeing the deterioration in growth rates, mainly due to strong production in the agricultural sector and, in some cases, increased activity in the extractive sector. This book provides a regional analysis, as well as country scan, of the CIS regional block economies. We will examine their history since the breakup of the formal Soviet Union and the formation of the CIS bloc, including creation of regional agreements such as the CIS Free Trade Area and the Eurasian Economic Union, a single economic market which now represents more than 180 million people. As a whole, our text attempts to better understand current, and future, prospects for economic growth in the region, as well as their individual national challenges.

This publication presents the proceedings of a regional technical meeting held in Budapest, Hungary from 6 to 10 March 2001. The meeting was organized and implemented by the Agricultural Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Martonvasar, Hungary, in close collaboration with FAO's Seed and Plant Genetic Resources Service. In line with the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action, the meeting recognized that one of the major challenges facing most countries in the region is the need to invest significant resources in strengthening their capacity to increase the availability of good quality seed of a wider range of plant varieties. This will contribute to the maximization of both agrobiodiversity and productivity, in order to achieve national food security while reducing environmental degradation and the depletion of natural resources."

This study presents the results of the multi-country study for farm debt in five Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries - Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, and the Ukraine. It offers a comparative analysis of the level and composition of farm debt in these countries and reviews the major reasons for farm debt accumulation in the 1990s.