Regional and National Perspectives of China's Integration into the WTO: A CGE Inquiry with Emphasis on the Agricultural Sector

China's integration in the World Trade Organization (WTO) is already on its fast track. Understanding the complexity of China's dynamic adjustment resulting from its membership in the WTO and the differential regional impacts within China is very important and poses crucial challenge in evaluating its impacts. In this study, we make an attempt to incorporate seven regional commodity-detailed models into a dis-aggregated multi-sector and multi-region China Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) framework. This framework has allowed us to evaluate the impacts of China's integration into the WTO at both national and regional levels and analyze the inter-linkages between China's provincial agricultural markets. Using the framework and assumptions about factor mobility, we assess the impacts on China's agricultural and non-agricultural sectors (regionally and nationally) by reduction of its trade policy distortions, such as tariffs rate changes and quantitative restrictions. We also evaluate the structural changes on China's national and regional production and trade as China implements its commitments and moves into the WTO.     

Measurement of the intensity of the reforms in professions and economic activities in Greece via a composite regulation index

The institutional framework regulating professions/ economic activities of the service sector in Greece has been recently liberalised extensively, to promote competition, conform to European Community regulations and fulfil commitments under the Memoranda of Economic and Financial Policies. This paper aims to capture quantitatively this major structural reform, by measuring for the first time the degree of regulation in 90 professions/ activities affected by the relevant reform laws. The degree of regulation is measured both for the regime before and for that after the laws, and the methodology employed is that of composite regulation indices. The index values obtained are used for evaluating the extent of the reforms and estimating correlations and regressions. The results of the analysis point to the existence of significant barriers to competition before the reforms and extensive liberalisation of the regulatory framework after the adoption of the relevant laws. Moreover, the results suggest that professions/activities characterised by more stringent restrictions before the reforms tend to be characterised by a comparatively higher intensity of regulations after the reforms.     

Cap reform: modelling supply response subject to the land set-aside

This paper uses duality theory to develop a model of European Community agriculture. The model is used to investigate the impact of the land set-aside provision of the recent package of reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy. We assume that producers chose output and variable input levels that maximize difference between revenue and variable cost. By including first-order conditions for the allocation of land across its uses, we impose that the observed allocations are profit-maximizing allocations. To overcome the problem of incorporating many outputs into an estimable production structure, we imposed a priori the restriction that the technology was weakly separable in major categories of outputs. With this restriction, it was possible to model production decisions in stages using consistent aggregates in the latter stages.     

China's regional agricultural productivity growth in 1985–2007: A multilateral comparison1

In this study, we estimate total factor productivity (TFP) growth as well as multilateral TFP index for 25 contiguous China provinces over the 1985–2007 period. Agricultural output growth for each province was decomposed into TFP growth and input growth, where input growth was further disaggregated into contributions from growth of labor, capital, land, and intermediate goods. Over the study period, TFP growth contributed 2.7 percentage points to output growth annually, which was slightly higher than the input growth contribution of 2.4 percentage points per annum. On average, the annual rate of productivity growth peaked during 1996–2000, at 5.1%. It slowed in 2000–2005 to a rate of 3.2% per annum and declined in the most recent years (2005–2007) to ?3.7%. Differences in productivity among regions persisted over the entire period. The tendency toward faster TFP growth in relatively well‐off coastal regions may imply a widening of regional inequality.     

Scale Economies and Efficiency in U.S. Agriculture: Are Traditional Farms History?

The structural transformation of agriculture in recent decades has raised serious concerns about the future of the family farm. This study examines the economic performance of U.S. farms, to explore the potential of smaller farms to compete with larger entities, and ultimately to survive in this rapidly changing environment. We use deterministic and stochastic frontier methods and survey data to measure and evaluate factors underlying scale economies (SEC) and efficiency (SEF) of corn-belt farms for 1996–2001. Our results suggest that family farms are both scale and technically inefficient. Potential for the exploitation of significant scale and scope economies, and some greater technical efficiency, seem to be driving trends toward increased farm size and dwindling competitiveness of the small family farm.     

Does trade liberalization and its associated increased economic activity affect permanently the value and pattern of trade flows?

Despite a number of multi-country case studies based on a variety of analytical frameworks and numerous econometric studies using large cross-country data sets that analyse trade openness and its induced economic activities that alters both the volume and value of trade flows, there is still disagreement among economists concerning the nature of this relationship. In this article, we follow a rather unique approach by estimating the density functions of the observed trade flows and the density functions of trade flows generated by tariff removal using an intertemporal global Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. Our inquiry is whether or not the trade flows generated by global tariff elimination impact economies in the long-run and alter their historical underlying distributions. If the latter case prevails, it implies that the economies follow a different transitional path into a new steady-state equilibrium. The density functions, estimated parameters and higher moments of the observed trade flow distributions are distinctly different from the parameter estimates of the trade flows generated by the model. In this sense, trade-inducing economic activity as generated by tariff removal and captured by the neoclassical specification of the model is associated with trade flows along a different transitional path from the observed trade flows.     

Regulatory Events and Biotech Firm Share Prices

Using the "event study" method, we measure the impact on agricultural biotechnology firm equity values of new regulations and other limitations placed on the marketing of biotech crops. Unanticipated declines to biotech firm stock prices indicate that newly imposed regulatory restrictions appear most likely to diminish profit expectations for these firms. The stock price reaction to decisions by crop handlers, processors, or retailers to segregate or limit the use of biotech crops and to reports questioning their safety are less pronounced. Incentives to engage in new biotech crop research and development may be diminished by these developments.