摘要：This project evaluates the impacts of the Uruguay Round Agreement (URA) on the grains sector and on other major subsectors of Canadian agriculture in a single -country general equilibrium framework. For this purpose a computable general equilibrium model of the Canadian economy that consists of six agricultural and two non-agricultural sectors was constructed. Categorization of the agricultural sectors was based on the magnitudes of various commodities, the focus of the study and the availability of data. The sectors include: 1) wheat, 2) other grains (including barley, oats, rye, corn, mixed grains, mustard seed, soybeans, canola and other oilseeds), 3) fruits and vegetables, 4) livestock, 5) milk and poultry, 6) other agriculture, 7) food industries (including meats, other than poultry, and dairy and fish products, fruit and vegetable preparations and other processed foods) and 8) the rest of the economy. The model was calibrated on 1991 data and a series of simulation experiments were conducted to assess the impacts of the URA and various other policy interventions. For some of these, a recursive dynamic model structure was developed and applied, in order to better assess the staged adoption, over the six-year implementation period, of the URA commitments. In the dynamic simulations, provision was made for sectoral productivity growth and year-by-year adjustment in factor inputs. In the other simulations the usual CGE model procedure of a comparative static approach was followed. To assess whether Canadian agriculture benefits from the URA, two sets of anticipated changes in world prices, taken from global studies of multilateral trade liberalization, were simulated, together with the URA policy commitments by Canada. These simulation experiments show that the minimum increases in world prices projected by global studies of the URA are too small to offset the negative effects on Canadian agriculture of the reductions in tariffs, export subsidies and domestic support from the URAcommitments, relative to the base period. However, if world prices were to change by the maximum level of projections of global URA effects, Canadian agricultural producers in aggregate gain from the URA. The sectors that benefit the most are wheat, other grains, and processed foods, for which production and exports increase appreciably. Imports of milk and poultry products increase substantially and livestock sector imports also increase. Labour and capital demand increase in agriculture, particularly in the wheat and other grains sectors. The highest increase in factor returns in agriculture is for agricultural land. Since the export prices applied above are exogenously determined, a third experiment was conducted to determine the extent of the world price changes for agricultural exports that would just offset the negative effects on sectoral domestic production of the URA policy commitments. This would require world prices that are about eleven per cent higher than in the base period for wheat and about ten per cent higher for other grains. The greatest increase in prices--by nearly thirteen per cent--would be required for the milk and poultry sector. More modest changes in world prices for the other agricultural sectors are needed to offset the impacts of the reductions in sectoral support necessitated by the URA. Most of these price changes lie within the ranges of world price projections from studies of the global effects of the URA.Other components of the project compared the relative importance of the three Canadian URA policy commitments (i.e. reductions in tariffs, export subsidies and domestic support). In terms of these URA commitments for Canada, the domestic support reductions were found to have the largest impact on domestic production, factor allocations and exports. Canada’s tariff reduction commitments had the least negative impact on Canadian agriculture.
