Книги

In this paper we use a general equilibrium model to examine the effects of international quota transfer when a quota restricts world commodity production whilst the trade in an intermediate good is not regulated. The analysis shows that, when the quota regime is not internationally transferable, intermediate input trade substitutes for final good trade. In these circumstances, the distortions are lower than expected. International quota transfer increases world welfare proportionally to quota rent gap. Welfare distribution is also conditioned by commodity terms of trade and, particularly, by the outcome of the intermediate good price.

The paper shows how analyses assuming perfect competition can yield a distorted estimation of the expected effects of a trade liberalization when market imperfections exist. The analytical framework adopted is very simple and three extreme imperfect market structures are considered. In the first case, the exporting country maximizes its producer and consumer surplus by intervening in the world market. The second market imperfection considered is the existence of a private firm playing the role of “pure middleman” in the world market. Then the case of a producer-owned marketing board which is granted exclusive export authority is addressed. It is shown that under all three scenarios, if perfect competition is assumed when market imperfections exist, the impact of a tariff reduction on prices and volume traded is overestimated. A ranking of the size of such distortions in the three cases analyzed is provided. Finally, it is proved that when a private firm exerts monopoly and monopsony power in the world market, both the importing and the exporting countries may well be better off if, rather than making a move towards trade liberalization, the importing country “compensates” the exporting country by means of a direct transfer.

Авторы книги исследуют эффект от либерализации мировой торговли продукцией сельского хозяйства. Рассматривается современное состояние торговли сельскохозяйственной продукцией и проблемы либерализации, изменение структуры мировых продовольственных рынков, политика протекционизма сельского хозяйства развитыми странами, моделируется ситуация либерализации торговли, рассчитываются потери и выгоды от данной политики.

Agrifood firms operate in a more global, saturated and competitive market than other manufacturing firms, and they have smaller size. These firms certainly need to define appropriate strategies related to accessing the international market and to investing in innovative activities. This two decisions are related to firms size because as Krugman states international trade is not only explained by differences in technology between countries but also by firms’ desire to extend their sales in foreign markets to take advantage of the economies of scales. Therefore, it seems to exist a simultaneous relation between firm size, exports and innovative activities. The aim of this paper is to analyse agrifood firms’ decisions on these three strategies: export behaviour, innovative activities and firm’s size in comparison to other manufacturing firms using some modification from the simultaneous model defined by Entorf and Pohlmeier. The study is focused on the Spanish manufactured firms taking special attention to the agri-food ones. Data come from a National Survey (“Encuesta de Estrategias Empresariales”) carried out by the “Fundación Empresa Pública”) from 1990. Results indicate that agri-food manufacturing firms decision process related to their size, export share and innovative activities is not a simultaneous process. Moreover, some differences with the rest of manufactured firms have been detected, In particular, agri-food firms have lower export shares, lower size and lower innovation intensity than Spanish firms in other manufacturing sectors. Spanish firms decision process on strategic variables (size, export share and innovation) is characterized by a recursive decision process where firms firstly decide export intensity, secondly, they decide their size or total sales depending on the previous decision and, finally, they decide their innovative intensity depending on the last two.

Milk producers in virtually every OECD country, and in many non-OECD countries as well, benefit from government interventions. Indeed, government support and protection for milk producers is more widespread than for any of the other commodities for which the OECD calculates producer subsidy equivalents. The purpose of the analysis reported in this paper was to investigate the relative market effects of these two varieties of government intervention in milk pricing: 1) interventions through trade measures applied to dairy products and 2) discriminatory pricing arrangements. Which kind of policy creates ‘dollar-for-dollar’ the greater effects? This paper shows the answer to that question is – it depends. Neither economic theory by itself, nor economic theory combined with ‘plausible’ ranges of numerical values for key parameters is enough to say definitely one way or another. In some plausibly real-life situations domestic milk pricing arrangements can be, at the margin, more distorting than explicit trade measures. The key determining parameters include the usual suspects – the relative elasticities of fluid and manufacturing milk demand, as well as initial price gap between fluid and manufacturing milk provided by various measures and the proportion of domestic milk production used to manufacture tradable dairy products.