Dealing with Economic Imbalances between Industry and Agriculture

Attaining and maintaining an economic balance between industry and agriculture is an important, unsettled policy issue. How to do it is not obvious. Seeing what governments do, it could be argued that they are adept at producing such imbalances. We know that many governments pursue policies that distort product and factor values by various means and thereby induce economic imbalances. In low income countries, governments tend to specialise in policies that keep agricultural production down; in high income countries governments do the exact opposite. Nevertheless, while governments are not blameless, it would be a serious error to attribute all imbalances between industry and agriculture to what governments do.