What the data tells us

Agricultural policies aim to address a wide range of issues, from assisting farmers to achieve adequate incomes to providing sufficient food at reasonable prices for consumers, and from improving the sector’s resilience to weather, market or other shocks to ensuring food safety and improving the environmental performance. To help governments better understand how much and in what form support is provided, the OECD created a set of indicators that express policy measures with numbers in a comparable way across time and between countries.

While the main agricultural support indicators used in our analysis are defined below, you can find a complete guide to all definitions and methodology in our online PSE Manual.

The Producer Support Estimate (PSE) indicator estimates the annual monetary value of gross transfers from consumers and taxpayers to agricultural producers, measured at the farm-gate level, arising from policy measures that support agriculture, regardless of their nature, objectives or impacts on farm production or income.

Complementing this indicator, the Consumer Support Estimate (CSE) reflects the annual monetary value of gross transfers to consumers of agricultural commodities, measured at the farm gate level, arising from policy measures that support agriculture, regardless of their nature, objectives or impacts on consumption of farm products.

On the other hand, the General Services Support Estimate (GSSE) is used to estimate the annual monetary value of gross transfers arising from policy measures that create enabling conditions for the primary agricultural sector through development of private or public services, and through institutions and infrastructures regardless of their objectives and impacts on farm production and income, or consumption of farm products. It includes policies where primary agriculture is the main beneficiary, but does not include any payments to individual producers. GSSE transfers do not directly alter producer receipts, costs or consumption expenditures.

Taken together, the Total Support Estimate (TSE) provides an overall estimate of the annual monetary value of all gross transfers from taxpayers and consumers arising from policy measures that support agriculture, net of associated budgetary receipts, regardless of their objectives and impacts on farm production and income, or consumption of farm products.