Книги

In Uganda, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa, poverty is concentrated in rural areas. Because agriculture accounts for a large share of incomes for these households, policies and external shocks that affect agriculture, including shifts in world prices, changes in agricultural productivity, and reductions in marketing costs, may have significant effects on rural poverty. In this paper, we use a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of the Ugandan economy, explicitly designed to capture regional variations in agricultural production and household incomes, to examine the implications of these policy changes and shocks.

Simulation results suggest that a doubling of area planted to coffee (the government.s target) would increase rural consumption by less than 2.0 percent, because of an estimated 10 percent decline in the world price of robusta coffee and an 11.3 percent real exchange rate appreciation of the Ugandan shilling. Smaller productivity increases in food crops may have greater potential to raise rural incomes, provided that markets perform well and producer incentives are maintained. A five percent increase in agricultural productivity raises consumption by 1.3 to 2.1 percent among rural households and lowers food prices by 3.4 to 3.8 percent relative to the CPI, thus benefiting households with high food consumption shares. Reducing agricultural marketing margins by 30 percent leads to increases of 2.3 to 4.1 percent in consumption of farm households, with the largest gains in regions where consumption out of own production is lower.

Empirical evidence suggests that agricultural futures price movements have fat-tailed distributions and exhibit sudden and unexpected price jumps. There is also evidence that the volatility of futures prices contains a term structure depending on both calendar-time and time to maturity. This paper extends Bates (1991) jump-diffusion option pricing model by including both seasonal and maturity effects in volatility. An in-sample fit to market option prices on wheat futures shows that our model outperforms previous models considered in the literature. A numerical example illustrates the economic significance of our results for option valuation.

We introduce an easily implemented and flexible calibration technique for partial demand systems, combining recent developments in incomplete demand systems and a set of restrictions conditioned on the available elasticity-estimates. The technique accommodates various degrees of knowledge on cross-price elasticities, satisfies curvature restrictions, and allows the recovery of an exact welfare measure for policy analysis. The technique is illustrated with a partial demand system for food consumption in Korea for different states of knowledge on cross-price effects. The consumer welfare impact of food and agricultural trade liberalization is measured.

В книге анализируется современная ситуация на рынке пшеницы, основные страны экспортёры и импортёры, даётся прогноз развития международного рынка. Авторы уделяют внимание таким странам, как Россия и Китай, чья роль на мировом рынке пшеницы значительно изменилась за последнее время. Анализируются и стратегии традиционных экспортёров пшеницы на мировом рынке - США, ЕС, Канады, Аргентины и Австралии. Поведение и развитие рынка пшеницы рассматривается через призму международных торговых соглашений. Под редакцией Д.Антл и В.Смит.

Regional grain production in the Russian Federation has developed in a number of different ways over the last years. The same is true for grain marketing. Not only the prices on local markets but also those in the nation-wide grain trade seem to be at least strongly influenced by regional authorities.

However, it is very likely that only a small part of the grain trade is exchanged interregionally. The growing independence of the Russian Federation’s political subjects seems to be primarily responsible for regional differences concerning grain production and marketing. The 1998 economic crisis is likely to obstruct the development of an efficient domestic grain market further.

This paper is concerned with the impact of the BSE crisis in the UK and focuses on price transmission between retail and farm prices. From a theoretical perspective we show that market power has an effect on price transmission between retail and farm prices following a demand shock. The empirical results suggest that the impact of a food scare on farm prices to be more than double that of retail prices, the direction of this effect being consistent with the impact of oligopoly dominating the effect (if any) of oligopsony.

However, important in assessing the full impact of a food scare is the ability of consumers to switch into substitute products. This is also evident following the BSE crisis with the availability of substitutes contributing significantly to the overall impact on price adjustment.

A modelling system is presented and used to analyse the impact of milk quota abolishment on Dutch agriculture and economy. The modelling system consists of a regionalised, agri-environmental, partial equilibrium, mathematical programming model of agriculture supply in the Netherlands integrated into a mixed input-output model. It was found that abolition of the milk quota system has large impacts on milk production and livestock numbers and composition. The latter is explained by the strict mineral and manure policies in the Netherlands; an increase in the numbers of dairy cows leaves less room for other livestock. It is also found that, although the total effect on gross value added in the Dutch economy is limited, the effects for individual industries can be large.

Reductions in transport and transaction costs are expected to have a major effect on the functioning of food markets in developing countries. For many developing countries, this is a relevant issue as it may have important consequences for the food markets in urban and rural deficit areas. A partial equilibrium model is presented to analyze the effects of reduced costs on cereal price formation, inter-regional cereal trade, and farmers' and traders' storage strategies for the case of Burkina Faso. Our results show that the high expectations with regard to the direct effects of cost reductions on food prices and food availability require some nuance. First, the effects of even a huge reduction of transport costs only will be small. Secondly, an element which is often neglected is that constructing a road between two cities may have unintended negative consequences on the competitive position of farmers and traders in other regions. Finally, it is concluded that only if transport and transaction costs are reduced simultaneously, both consumers and farmers will benefit significantly.