Книги

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.

We analyse the evolving pattern of Hungary.s agri-food trade using recently developed empirical procedures based on the classic Balassa index and its symmetric transformation. The extent of trade specialisation exhibits a declining trend; Hungary lost comparative advantage for a number of product groups over the 1990s. The indices of specialisation have also tended to converge. For particular product groups, the picture is mixed: indices are reasonably stable for product groups with comparative disadvantage, but those with weak to strong comparative advantage show significant variation. The results reinforce the finding of a general decrease in specialisation, but do not support the idea of self-reinforcing mechanisms, emphasised strongly in much of the endogenous growth and trade literature.

The paper analyzes the impact of different agricultural trade policies on Russia’s bilateral trade patterns, price and quantity changes, and welfare effects for producers, consumers, and the state budget. Three experiments are simulated using a partial equilibrium model based on the Armington approach. The results show that the current situation of import tariff-free trade between Russia and other CIS countries has small positive welfare effects for the Russian Federation in comparison to a situation where import tariffs between these countries were to be imposed.

However, according to the results, an elimination of import tariffs against all trading partners is preferable for Russia in terms of net welfare. An increase in discriminatory trade barriers against non-CIS countries would cause overall welfare losses for the Russian economy.

Intra-industry trade in agri-food products between Hungary and the EU is shown to be low and dominated by vertically rather than horizontally differentiated products, suggesting higher economic adjustment costs. Following recent empirical studies, we then test econometrically for the determinants of this trade using different measures of horizontal and vertical trade, and employing an array of popular explanatory variables. Results suggest that separating the measure of intra-industry trade into vertical and horizontal provides for better estimation and supports the contention that the determinants may differ by type of trade. In the regression analysis, the level of intra-industry trade is found to serve as a better dependent variable than the degree or share of intra-industry trade.