Книги

This paper proposes a partial equilibrium displacement model that differentiates wheat according to its end-use and country of origin to investigate the impact of alternative European trade policies on wheat supply and demand in France. Transmission, demand and supply elasticities are estimated for each class and origin of wheat. Simulation results show that rebalancing trade protection across wheat classes encourages domestic supply of high quality wheat and displaces imports from North America.

Using a partial equilibrium model of world agriculture, we investigate the multilateral removal of all border taxes and farm programs and their distortion of world agricultural markets. These distortions have significant terms-of-trade effects. World trade is also significantly impacted by both types of distortions. Trade expansion is substantial for most commodities, especially dairy, meats, and vegetable oils. Net agricultural and food exporters (Brazil, Australia, and Argentina) emerge with expanded exports; whereas net importing countries with limited distortions before liberalization are penalized by higher world markets prices and reduced imports. The US gains significant export shares in livestock products and imports more dairy products. Without protection and domestic subsidies, the EU loses many of its livestock and dairy export markets.

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.