Second meeting of IOs on Measuring the Agricultural Policy Environment

SECOND MEETING OF IOS ON MEASURING THE AGRICULTURAL POLICY ENVIRONMENT

by David Laborde and Karen Brooks | January 22, 2014

OECDmeetingThe second meeting of International Organizations (IOs) and experts interested in collaboration on measuring the agricultural policy environment took place in Paris at OECD headquarters, on December 13th, 2013, co-convened by OECD and the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM).

The goal of the initiative officially launched during the first meeting in June, 2013, is to create a common platform for harmonization of approaches and coordination of activities of various stakeholders in the field of measuring agricultural policies around the world.

During the meeting in December, each international organization presented its work focusing on issues of consistency in methodology, ability to provide metadata/documentation of a certain quality, and commitment to continuity in updating the measures.

As requested during the first meeting, IFPRI has built and presented a prototype platform for sharing of data and methodologies developed by the several IOs, allowing comparison of results, and displaying the inventory of publicly available materials.

Next Steps

IFPRI will continue to work with participants of the technical group to develop the internet platform for sharing of methodology and data.

Each participating organization will designate a steward of the platform to take part in further development and enrichment of it. OECD and IFPRI (Jonathan Brooks and David Laborde) will lead an effort already started to prepare a joint paper summarizing the current baseline of information on price policies in developed and developing countries, and providing the guidelines for populating the data base.

Work on improving the coherence of efforts to collect and classify public expenditure data will continue in a separate but related work stream.

The consortium will meet again in about 6 months to review progress.