A spatial equilibrium analysis of trade policy reforms on the world wheat market

Since a few countries produce most of the world's wheat, and consumption is widespread across the world, wheat is one of the most commonly traded agricultural commodities. In recent years, the wheat market has been going through difficult phases as wheat prices are depressed. The fall in wheat prices is attributed to a supply glut and restrictive trade barriers. This study develops a large-scale spatial equilibrium trade model for wheat to analyse the effects of removing trade barriers (tariffs and subsidies) on each country's/region's price, supply, demand, trade, welfare, and bilateral trade flows. The results show that trade liberalization leads to an increase (decrease) in prices in the exporting (importing) countries. Production and exports increase in the exporting country, and consumption and imports increase in the importing country. Consequently, the volume of trade also increases. The welfare of most countries rises, and thus, world welfare also rises.     

Reforming Food Subsidy Schemes: Estimating the Gains from Self-targeting in India

The paper uses the theoretical framework of the theory of tax reform to analyze whether a “small” change in an existing food subsidy program can be both welfare‐improving and revenue‐neutral. It shows how existing econometric methods can be adapted to estimate demand parameters even when household‐level data exhibit little price variation because the government controls food prices. The methodology is used to estimate welfare changes from shifting a rupee of subsidy on existing commodities to coarse cereals in the Indian public distribution system.     

Regulated price reforms and unregulated substitutes: the case of residential piped gas in Argentina

This paper examines the impact of regulated piped gas price changes on connection decisions and households’ welfare. The analysis explicitly considers bottled gas as a substitute for piped gas and therefore uses a simple utility maximization model that yields both a gas-type choice model and a demand specification whose parameterization allows examining households’ responses to regulated price changes. The results show that relative gas prices and household features explain households’ piped gas usage. They also provide insights on the distribution of welfare changes. The findings illustrate the impact of tariff rebalancing and unregulated substitutes on further access to regulated network services.     

Tooke's approach to explaining prices

This paper examines the method of analysis and theoretical approach Thomas Tooke (1774–1858) employed in his empirical study of English prices. It is shown that Tooke adopted the “long period method” formulated by Adam Smith to analyse a capitalist society. It is shown that like most nineteenth-century classical economists, Tooke adopted a modified version of Adam Smith's “adding-up” approach to normal prices and distribution which incoporated Ricardo's theory of rent. The paper shows that based on this approach, Tooke explained short-run fluctuations in prices be reference to factors that disrupted the adjustment of supply to the “effectual” demand for commodities.     

UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD WOOL MARKET: TRADE,PRODUCTIVITY AND GROWERS’ INCOMES*

Applying recent estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) growth on Australian sheep farms, we analyse the long‐run effects of TFP growth on the world wool market using a detailed model of the world wool market that treats raw wool, wool textiles and wool garments as heterogeneous commodities. The model divides the world wool market into nine regions and eight major industrial sectors capturing the extreme nature of the multistage production system through which wool passes. We find that regional sheep producer's welfare responds by between ‐0.9 per cent and 0.7 per cent assuming conservative TFP growth over the period 1995/96–2003/04. Sensitivity analysis shows the welfare effects to be robust with respect to all model parameters, but sensitive to the size of the TFP growth and the degree of TFP spill‐over. Our realistic representation of the multistage nature of the wool production system shows that wool inputs steadily decline in importance in moving from early‐ to late‐stage processing. This production structure indicates that the productivity of sheep farmers has little effect on the prices of and demand for wool garments. In contrast, trade in wool inputs is very responsive to the productivity of sheep farmers.     

Measuring the effectiveness of non-price export promotion using a supply-side approach

In this paper we assess the effectiveness of the Market Promotion Program (MPP) in increasing U.S. exports and benefitting U.S. agricultural producers and food processors. Export shipments are linked to producer welfare using Kohli's (1978) profit maximization (GNP function) approach to modeling international trade. Using estimated profit functions in conjunction with a synthetic export demand function for processed agricultural products, we compute changes in farm and food processing sector profits that result from alternative own-price and advertising elasticities of export demand with and without the MPP subsidy. This approach allows us to investigate aggregate welfare effects of nonprice promotion without requiring the difficult task of estimating the export demand effects of market promotion activities for numerous commodities and importing countries. First version received: April 1999/Final version received: June 2000     

War,terror, and the tourism market in Israel

A supply and demand model of the Israeli hotel industry is developed, distinguishing between its domestic and foreign sectors. Model simulations are employed to examine the impacts of war and terrorist incidents on tourist activity and hotel revenues. Foreign demand for Israeli hotel stays is highly price-elastic and income-inelastic, and moderately sensitive to terrorist events. Domestic demand is price-inelastic, income-elastic, and terror-insensitive. In the wake of terror attacks, hotels' supply or minimum prices to Israeli tourists shift downward, reducing local market prices and encouraging more local tourism. However, the magnitude of these shifts is minor, and the local market thus provides little buffer for dropoffs in foreign tourism. By permitting excess capacity in such fashion, hotels respond rationally to the price inelasticity of local demand.     

Calculating the welfare costs of import restrictions in the imperfect substitutes model

This paper supplies equations for partial-equilibrium calculations of the welfare effects of tariffs and quotas when the imported good and the competing domestic good are imperfect substitutes in demand. The equations take into account the response of the price of the domestic substitute. Although other studies have acknowledged this response, they have failed to account for it in their welfare calculations. To demonstrate the importance of this response, it is shown how it affects the calculations for the welfare costs of tariffs and quotas on US imports of footwear. It is shown that ignoring the response of domestic prices leads to significant overstatement of the welfare costs of tariffs and significant understatement of the welfare costs of quotas for the industry.     

On inferring individual behaviour from market behaviour in a predetermined quantities model

This article develops the theoretical basis of individual behaviour recovered from market behaviour in a predetermined quantities model. As applied economists argue, an inverse demand system may be empirically sound within the framework of classical demand theory. However, it should not lead to the conclusion that the market responses for changes in quantity should be used to see welfare effects instead of the individual responses by price changes as far as the market is concerned. It shows theoretically and empirically how individual responses can be recovered from market responses in a predetermined quantities model. It suggests that the fundamental results of this article should be used on interpreting empirical results from the predetermined quantities models.     

Monetary policy and stock price dynamics with limited asset market participation

We study a New-Keynesian DSGE model subject to limited asset market participation (LAMP) and assess whether monetary policy should respond to stock prices for what concerns the determinacy and the learnability (E-stability) of the Rational Expectations Equilibrium (REE). We find that interest rate rules granting a positive response to stock prices facilitate both the determinacy and the E-stability of the fundamental REE when the degree of LAMP is sufficiently large to generate an inverted aggregate demand channel of monetary policy transmission. Moreover, according to our analysis, policy rules responding to stock prices appear to perform better than more standard rules responding to output with respect to both equilibrium determinacy and aggregate welfare.     

Trade and Tradability: Exports, Imports, and Factor Markets in the Salter-Swan Model

We extend the Salter-Swan model to include both factor markets and semi-traded goods. In our model, changes in relative factor prices depend on changes in world commodity prices, factor endowments, and the trade balance. In contrast, only changes in world commodity prices can affect factor prices in the neoclassical trade model. The inclusion of semi-traded goods weakens the magnification effect in both the Stolper-Samuelson and Rybczynski theorems. When imports and domestic goods are poor substitutes, a characteristic of some commodities in developing countries, the sign of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem is reversed.     

Joint Allocation of Leisure and Consumption Commodities: A Japanese Extended Consumer Demand System 1979—90

In this study we estimate the parameters of a household expenditure function which includes joint choice of leisure and consumption commodities in scope without a separability assumption. We have used Japanese prices, wage rate, labour supply, and expenditure data on ten commodity groups, collected from 47 cities over 12 years. This data set has the advantage that separate observations are available for each data point for all the variables. We employed the AI demand system, for estimation. Controlling for time-specific effects, the result implied a definite rejection of the weak separability of labour supply and commodity choice, and non-rejection of the homogeneity and symmetry restrictions on the demand system. All the own-price elasticities are significantly negative, and both substitutes and complements are observed across commodity groups. As for the negativity, all but one of the eigenvalues of the substitution matrix are negative. The result as a whole showed consistency with demand theory. The estimated compensated labour supply elasticity is 0.39, which is in reasonable agreement with the previous studies.     

ESTIMATING WELFARE IN INSURANCE MARKETS USING VARIATION IN PRICES

We provide a graphical illustration of how standard consumer and producer theory can be used to quantify the welfare loss associated with inefficient pricing in insurance markets with selection. We then show how this welfare loss can be estimated empirically using identifying variation in the price of insurance. Such variation, together with quantity data, allows us to estimate the demand for insurance. The same variation, together with cost data, allows us to estimate how insurer's costs vary as market participants endogenously respond to price. The slope of this estimated cost curve provides a direct test for both the existence and nature of selection, and the combination of demand and cost curves can be used to estimate welfare. We illustrate our approach by applying it to data on employer-provided health insurance from one specific company. We detect adverse selection but estimate that the quantitative welfare implications associated with inefficient pricing in our particular application are small, in both absolute and relative terms.     

市场情绪如何影响城市房价

基于行为金融学理论建立了房地产情绪指数影响房价的模型，借鉴Baker and Wurgler（2006）提出的构建资本市场投资者情绪指数的方法，从供需两方选取合适的情绪指标；同时，运用大数据方法，选取百度指数作为情绪指标，运用主成分分析法构建了我国35个大中城市房地产市场的情绪指数，实证研究了市场情绪对房地产价格的影响。另外，还测度不同区域房地产市场情绪指数，通过实证分析横向对比东部和中西部城市市场情绪对房价的影响程度。实证结果表明，市场情绪对房地产价格有着显著的正向影响；市场情绪对房地产价格的正向影响呈现区域异质性，东部地区市场情绪对房地产价格的正向影响强于中西部地区。     

INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The paper considers a two-region model of trade based on the authors'earlier (HS) model, in which two nontraded goods, one urban and one rural, were introduced into the Harris-Todaro model. The HS framework captures the duality of the labour market, and it is argued that the HS model is suited to the purpose of regional analysis where the urban and rural agents may be in conflict as their welfare (income) may not respond in an identical manner to exogenous shocks and policy changes. The paper examines the implications of a change in capital and the terms of trade on outputs and regional incomes. It is established that in response to a terms-of-trade shock the prices of urban and rural nontraded goods could move in opposite directions, so structural change could also be in opposite directions. The same could also be true of welfare in the two regions.     

Physical energy cost serves as the “invisible hand” governing economic valuation: Direct evidence from biogeochemical data and the U.S. metal market

Energy supply is mandatory for the production of economic value. Nevertheless, tradition dictates that an enigmatic “invisible hand” governs economic valuation. Physical scientists have long proposed alternative but testable energy cost theories of economic valuation, and have shown the gross correlation between energy consumption and economic output at the national level through input-output energy analysis. However, due to the difficulty of precise energy analysis and highly complicated real markets, no decisive evidence directly linking energy costs to the selling prices of individual commodities has yet been found. Over the past century, the US metal market has accumulated a huge body of price data, which for the first time ever provides us the opportunity to quantitatively examine the direct energy-value correlation. Here, by analyzing the market price data of 65 purified chemical elements (mainly metals) relative to the total energy consumption for refining them from naturally occurring geochemical conditions, we found a clear correlation between the energy cost and their market prices. The underlying physics we proposed has compatibility with conventional economic concepts such as the ratio between supply and demand or scarcity's role in economic valuation. It demonstrates how energy cost serves as the “invisible hand” governing economic valuation. Thorough understanding of this energy connection between the human economic and the Earth's biogeochemical metabolism is essential for improving the overall energy efficiency and furthermore the sustainability of the human society.     

Growth and decline of the paper industry: an econometric analysis of US regions

An explanation was sought of the different growth of the paper and paperboard industries in regions of the United States. To that end, a theory of regional demand and supply was formulated. Elasticities of regional production with respect to important supply and demand factors were then calculated by econometric methods, with data for the period 1950–78. These elasticities were used, together with the observed average annual percentage changes of the corresponding variables, to determine the contribution each had on the growth of production. The results indicated that demand was the major factor causing the differences in growth rates. The rapid growth of paper and paperboard production in the regions of the South and West was spurred mostly by high economic and demographic growth in their market area. Supply (cost) factors, and the price of paper substitutes, were found to have played a minor role in comparison.     

Scarcity and prices

A complete set of definitions of scarcity and some theorems on the relationship between competitive prices and scarcity of commodities are introduced. Competitive prices do not always represent signals of scarcity. Anyway under the hypothesis of monotonic preferences scarce commodities have positive prices, and when all commodities are both normal and gross substitutes, prices are indices of relative scarcity. Consequently, the connection between scarcity and prices is not an absolute foundation of economic theory.     

Return policies, market outcomes, and consumer welfare

Abstract.  The effect of return policies on market outcomes is studied in a model where consumers differ in their valuations of time. Product reliability is identified with defect rates. Producers first choose reliability levels and then compete in prices. For given defect rates, allowing returns makes products closer substitutes, enhancing competition and reducing prices. Being closer substitutes makes higher reliability less worthwhile, which reduces reliability. While the decrease in reliability reduces consumer welfare, the decrease in prices raises it. The latter dominates, so that aggregate consumer welfare increases with return policy.     

浙江出口商品结构竞争力实证分析

全球金融危机引发的国际市场需求萎缩恶化了浙江的出口贸易环境,进一步使浙江出口商品的结构问题显现出来。分析了后危机时代浙江出口的总体情况、浙江出口商品的结构及浙江出口商品竞争力发展趋势。并对如何优化浙江出口商品结构提出了对策建议。