Producers' entitlement guarantees: A serious option for liberalizing Japan's rice and dairy sectors
Abstract Liberalization of Japan's rice and dairy markets along the lines proposed by GATT in December 1991 is politically and financially feasible. Tradable producers' entitlement guarantees (PEGs) are an income support measure which is partly decoupled from price support. The fact that PEGs would still bear some relationship to output would make a gradual liberalization of trade much more acceptable to farmers, who could be fully compensated for the loss in income caused by greater exposure to foreign competition. PEGs would still cause moderate trade distortions, however, which would decrease as tariffs were reduced and eventually disappear with them. PEGs could thus provide a useful platform for persuading the Japanese government to liberalize agriculture.
Japanese Agriculture Under Siege: The Political Economy of Agricultural Policies . By Yujiro Hayami. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. xiv, 145 pp. $45.00.
An intelligent layman seeking more than a superficial understanding of the history, politics, and theories underlying Japan's difficult international agricultural relations will find this book ideal for his purpose. It deals with the agricultural adjustment problem that lies at the root of most economic difficulties associated with the farm. This problem surfaces because the demand for agricultural products grows more slowly than demand for the products of other industries as the nation's income rises. This requires the transfer of labor and other resources to other industries. Historically, this transfer has not taken place rapidly enough to prevent a relative decline in farm income. When this fall takes place in more developed countries (MDCs), a farm lobby emerges to shift a part of the adjustment costs to the nonfarm population. In Japan, in tne more than forty years after the Pacific War, farm circumstances have changed many times. Farmers benefited substantially from the food shortage and the land reform program in the first decade after the war. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1950s, because of the extraordinarily rapid growth of industrial productivity, rural household income had fallen much below (about twenty-three percent) that of urban households. This prompted the appearance of an agricultural lobby consisting of the farmers, the Agricultural Collective Associations, and the Liberal Democratic Party. This powerful trilateral coalition spearheaded the passage of the 1961 Agricultural Basic Law whose primary goal was to make agricultural income levels equal to those in other industries. Farm household income was raised by increasing the prices of some agricultural products by decree, erecting barriers against the import of competing agricultural products, and subsidizing agricultural inputs. Meanwhile another transformation also helped to raise farm income. This was the increasing availability of full-time nonfarm jobs for members of agricultural households who could continue to work part-time on the farms.
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.