Three Essays on the Impact of International Trade Policy on Agricultural Input Markets PDF Download

Author: Lei Lei
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
This dissertation provides a thorough analysis of the impact of international trade policy on agricultural input markets. International agricultural trade are often affected by policies in importing and exporting countries. These policies can be directly or indirectly imposed on the production inputs. It is important to understand the markets’ responses in both importing and exporting countries to the policies changes through vertical linkages between the input and output markets. This dissertation provides three essays to study this topic from the prospective of importer, exporter, input market, output market, and trade negotiation mechanism. Essay 1 studies a European Union trade policy induced technological innovation, specifically on its impact on the U.S. apple markets. I adopt the Ex Ante approach to simulate the market reaction to both the European Union policy change and the technological innovation. The research finds that the policy induced technological innovation benefits the outputs that are intensive in the policy affected input. The methodology and conclusion contribute to research on markets with highly differentiated products. Essay 2 is motivated by the decade-long cotton dispute between Brazil and the United States. The dispute was arbitrated based on several domestic policies of the United States. This chapter analyzes the impact of a U.S. domestic policy on 1) land re-allocation with a difference-in difference model; 2) international cotton trade between the United States and the rest of world including Brazil with a partial equilibrium simulation model. Based on the analysis, I find limited policy impact of removing this particularly U.S. domestic policy on international cotton trade. The result is consistent to the World Trade Organization arbitration of the dispute. Essay 3 summarizes three most common methods of quantifying the trade impact of non-tariff trade measures in the literature. I carefully compare the advantages and disadvantages between each method. A guidance of how to choose an appropriate method based on the characteristic of a non-tariff trade measure is summarized. To illustrate the guidance, I show a real example of apple trade with non-tariff trade measure imposed by the European Union.

Author: David Blandford
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 1786349779
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Current Issues in Global Agricultural and Trade Policy presents an authoritative perspective on matters that will contribute to the future shape of global markets for agricultural products. Written by a rare grouping of eminent and globally leading agricultural economists from a wide variety of backgrounds, the book provides an analytical overview of the academic and professional work of the late Timothy E Josling, an outstanding intellectual innovator.Areas covered in the book include farm policies of the EU and the USA, analysis of farm support and its effects, US trade policy for agricultural products, analysis of food security, implications of sanitary and phytosanitary measures, and relevance of geographical indications in international trade. The implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for agricultural trade policy are discussed in an endnote. This book throws light on some of the most impressive achievements of the agricultural economics profession.

Author: Bowen Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
International trade in agricultural and food commodities has grown rapidly during the past five decades, with increasingly more countries participating in the international mar- kets either as food importers or as food exporters. Despite the fast growth, international agricultural trade, however, is still largely affected by various policy distortions. This is especially the case in developing countries, in which opening to the international market is often perceived to be in conflict with their policy objectives of ensuring food security. In this context, this dissertation constitutes three essays toward better understanding of how international trade is affected by policy and how it can affect food security in developing countries. The first essay conducts a case study with quantitative analysis regarding the trade policy for grain commodities in China. Specifically, China emerged as a grain importing country in mid 2000s. In 2016, the U.S., a major grain exporter, launched a trade dispute against China at the World Trade Organization, arguing that China has been restricting its grain imports via tariff quota administration. Despite the criticism of the U.S., little do we know about the extent to which the grain imports in China were actually restricted by its trade policy, mainly because China's grain import behaviors have not been sufficiently studied. For instance, even the import demand elasticity, a key input into policy assessment, is unknown. To fill this gap in the literature, this article investigates impacts of the tariff quota administration on China's grain imports from its trading partners. We estimate import demand elasticity for each grain commodity using a source differentiated import demand model and then use the elasticity estimates to quantify the policy impacts on trade. In particular, the tariff quota administration is treated as a non tariff barrier and measured by ad valorem tariff equivalents in the model. We find that the tariff quota administration might have reduced the quota fill rates for the grain commodities by 10-35% during 2013-2017 in China, and that the wheat imports from the U.S. were largely negatively affected. We also find that the tariff quota administration acts like an import variable levy - its import restrictiveness varies negatively with world prices, leading to lower import demand elasticities. The second essay concerns the trade impacts on food price variability in developing countries. In particular, we are interested in this question: do food imports increase the variability of domestic food prices? The question matters because if imports destabilize domestic prices, storing crops for future consumption may prove an appealing strategy to cope with the adverse supply effects of a more unstable climate. Unfortunately, public storage has proven to be unsustainable due to the high costs of carrying crop inventories over time and the inability of policy planners to correctly forecast changes in domestic supply. In this context, it is important to understand the roles of both imports and stocks in affecting domestic food price variability. Using maize prices observed in 76 maize markets of 27 maize net importers across Africa, Asia and Latin America during 2000-2015, we find that, on average, a 1% increase in the ratio of imports to total consumption is correlated with a 0.29% reduction of the intra-annual coefficient of variation of maize prices; likewise a 1% increase in the amount of maize available in stocks at the beginning of the season is correlated with a 0.22% reduction in the said coefficient. We also find that climate-induced supply shocks toward mid-century may increase maize price variability in the focus countries by around 10%. These increases, however, could be offset with similar increases in the ratio of imports to total consumption or in the stock-to-use ratio at the beginning of the crop marketing year. The third essay also concerns the trade impacts on food price variability in developing countries. Rather than focusing on the roles of imports and stocks, we look into the effects of foreign yield shocks on domestic food price variability in this essay. Around two thirds of developing countries are now net food importers. While enjoying economical food in the international market, these countries have become increasingly more concerned that their food price stability is now vulnerable to foreign yield shocks, which are expected to grow in frequency and intensity in the future due to the climate change. Yet, the extent to which foreign yield shocks could affect food price stability in the food-importing countries have not been explicitly quantified in previous studies. This article aims to fill the gap by estimating the effects of foreign maize yield shocks on domestic maize price variability. We perform the analysis using price data of 74 maize markets in 24 net food-importing countries during 2000-2016. We find that positive foreign yield shocks have negative effects on domestic price variability, meaning that domestic prices become more stable under positive foreign yield shocks. Negative foreign yield shocks, however, do not have significant effects on domestic price variability, except for causing higher price variability in a few landlocked countries. We also find that domestic maize price variability could increase in the coming decades due to the increasing variability of maize yields under climate change. Yet, most focus countries seem to have accumulated stocks sufficient enough to maintain stable prices. We conclude that food-importing countries benefit from the international market in domestic price stability, and that storage could be an effective policy tool to complement international trade for price stabilization.

Author: Chun Kwon Yoo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture, Cooperative
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Since the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA) in 1994, global competition in Korean agricultural markets has significantly increased. The objective of this dissertation is to identify the effects of trade liberalization on productivity and pricing in the Korean rice market (Essay 1 and 2) and on the entire agricultural sector (Essay 3). Rice is the major agricultural commodity in Korean agriculture with Rice Processing Complexes (RPC), i.e. agricultural cooperatives, playing a major role in the rice processing industry. Essays 1 and 2 examine RPCs adjustment to the increasingly competitive market environment. The first essay draws on the emerging heterogeneous-firms trade model to test the hypothesis that trade liberalization forces least productivity firms to exit (extensive margin) and encourages reallocation of resources and market share to high productivity firms (intensive margin) within an industry. The above churning results in an increase in the average productivity of the industry. Results from using plant-level RPC data from 2002-2008 to test the above hypothesis show that international competition via increases in rice import (Minimum Market Access) has the largest effect on RPCs' productivity. In particular, greater competition shifts the left tail of the productivity distribution to the right, increasing the median productivity of the Korean rice processing industry. Thus, the above findings suggest that RPCs, often considered to be quasi-public firms shielded from competition, face significant adjustment following trade liberalization. Economic theory suggests that a key input, i.e. raw product that farmer-members deliver, is treated as given in marketing cooperatives' optimization, unlike in the case of profit maximizing firms. Thus, only if cooperatives minimize the cost of conventional inputs (labor and capital) cost and additionally, set the price of the raw product optimally, their production is efficient. Essay 2 examines RPCs' pricing efficiency, based on the above theory, by incorporating farmers' supply function of raw product (rice) into hypothesized RPCs' optimization framework. Results show that only large RPCs' pricing and thus, production is efficient. For small and medium RPCs, processing size, i.e. realizing economies of scale, is important for their efficiency. The latter finding suggests merger of neighboring small and medium RPCs to both expand supply of raw rice and lower processing costs. In fact, results show that post-merger RPCs have attained pricing efficiency similar to large RPCs. Since 2002, about 20 percent of Korean RPCs have merged adjusting to the competitive market and improving pricing efficiency and overall productivity. In the third essay, the effects of agricultural openness on aggregate agricultural productivity and farmers' welfare in Korea are examined. Results indicate that the openness significantly improves agricultural productivity, with a marked increase following URAA. However, in real terms, farm products' price and net farm business income have declined after trade liberalization. The findings show that agricultural trade liberalization has greatly benefitted Korean consumers, but the net impact on farmers' welfare from productivity growth, real price decline and transfer payments is less clear. The three essays show that Korean agriculture has been adjusting to the increasingly competitive environment in primary and processing sectors, contributing to overall gains for the Korean economy. Encouraging resource reallocation towards more competitive segments of Korean agriculture along with targeted transfer payments to revitalize losers from trade are needed to continue to realize and share gains from trade.

Author: Byung Min Soon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
The first essay introduces a new method to measure non-tariff barriers (NTBs). NTBs to agricultural trade are believed to have increased while tariffs fell. Hence, measuring NTBs is important and several alternative methods have been used. I develop a method that combines cointegration tests and an equilibrium model. These seemingly disparate methods are used to estimate the size of NTBs and to assess their economic impact. I apply our method to the Russian chicken import ban and find larger impacts compared to a common method based on price gaps. This new method can help trade policy analysts convert implicit economic assumptions of cointegration test results into explicit NTB measures that can explain the observed pattern in time series price data and estimate their impacts. The second essay examines the impact of the impacts of the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) outbreak in the U.S. on the Japanese beef market. The time-varying Armington model allows us to examine how the BSE outbreak affected the elasticity of substitution and the country of origin bias. Moreover, I estimate beef demands in the case that the BSE outbreak did not occur. The BSE outbreak caused higher demand for Australian beef and lower demand for U.S. beef, while domestic beef demand was only modestly affected. Specifically, the outbreak affected imported frozen beef demands more than imported chilled beef demands. The third essay explores the impact of tariff rate quota (TRQ) on the Korean rice market. Korea replaced its rice import quota with a TRQ in 2015. A structural model representing the Korean rice market is developed to evaluate this new trade policy and examine the possibility of Korean rice imports under uncertainty. Results indicate that rice imports in excess of the current TRQ quantity are unlikely for a range of market conditions. Two scenarios, which are the over-quota tariff rate reduction and the Minimum Market Access (MMA) quantity expansion, show how the market responds to policy changes. In addition, Korean rice imports are sensitive to consumer preferences for different rice types.

Author: Ephraim Chirwa
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199683522
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This book takes forward our understanding of agricultural input subsidies in low income countries.

Author: Steve Martinez
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1437933629
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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Book Description
This comprehensive overview of local food systems explores alternative definitions of local food, estimates market size and reach, describes the characteristics of local consumers and producers, and examines early indications of the economic and health impacts of local food systems. Defining ¿local¿ based on marketing arrangements, such as farmers selling directly to consumers at regional farmers¿ markets or to schools, is well recognized. Statistics suggest that local food markets account for a small, but growing, share of U.S. agricultural production. For smaller farms, direct marketing to consumers accounts for a higher percentage of their sales than for larger farms. Charts and tables.

Author: Matthias Kalkuhl
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319282018
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description
This book provides fresh insights into concepts, methods and new research findings on the causes of excessive food price volatility. It also discusses the implications for food security and policy responses to mitigate excessive volatility. The approaches applied by the contributors range from on-the-ground surveys, to panel econometrics and innovative high-frequency time series analysis as well as computational economics methods. It offers policy analysts and decision-makers guidance on dealing with extreme volatility.

Author: Fred Magdoff
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583673903
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The failures of “free-market” capitalism are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the production and distribution of food. Although modern human societies have attained unprecedented levels of wealth, a significant amount of the world’s population continues to suffer from hunger or food insecurity on a daily basis. In Agriculture and Food in Crisis, Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar have assembled an exceptional collection of scholars from around the world to explore this frightening long-term trend in food production. While approaching the issue from many angles, the contributors to this volume share a focus on investigating how agricultural production is shaped by a system that is oriented around the creation of profit above all else, with food as nothing but an afterthought. As the authors make clear, it is technically possible to feed to world’s people, but it is not possible to do so as long as capitalism exists. Toward that end, they examine what can be, and is being, done to create a human-centered and ecologically sound system of food production, from sustainable agriculture and organic farming on a large scale to movements for radical land reform and national food sovereignty. This book will serve as an indispensible guide to the years ahead, in which world politics will no doubt come to be increasingly understood as food politics.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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