Residual demand measures of market power of Russian wheat exporters

Traditionally, the international wheat market has been considered a good example of a market with perfect competition. Yet, several articles provide evidence of imperfect competition and price discrimination in the wheat trade. However, these studies focused on traditional high‐quality wheat exporters such as Canada and the United States. In contrast, this article investigates whether Russian wheat exporters exercise market power in eight selected importing countries using the residual demand elasticity (RDE) model. The article makes two major contributions. First, it focuses on a nontraditional exporter, who exports mainly wheat of mediocre quality to low‐ and middle‐income countries. Second, the RDE model is estimated for the first time using a nonlinear estimator, the instrumental variable Poisson pseudo‐maximum likelihood estimator. This is important because the double logarithmic functional form can provide biased results in the presence of heteroskedasticity. The results indicate that Russian wheat exporters can exercise market power in only a few markets, while they are price takers in the majority of importing countries.     

Are We Moving Towards Functioning Agricultural Markets and Trade Relations?

We introduce a special feature on the functioning of international agricultural markets. This feature is motivated by the increased interest in the functioning of commodity markets raised by unprecedented price turbulences since 2008, major structural changes through changed roles of emerging economies and related concerns regarding food security. We argue that the delineation of non‐functioning markets from markets that adequately adjusted to adverse framework conditions lacks theoretical foundation. We discuss the relevance of some results on institutions for agricultural markets in emerging and transition countries. A synthesis of the articles included in the special feature is provided by highlighting the selection of topics that span a topical range covering price formation on world and domestic markets, market power and trade policy modelling.     

Gravity model estimation: fixed effects vs. random intercept Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood

The standard Anderson and van Wincoop gravity model has typically been estimated using a fixed-effects approach. However, a fixed-effects approach has a major drawback: it does not allow for the estimation of exporter- and importer-invariant variables. Thus, at least in a cross-sectional context, economically relevant variables such as exporter and importer gross domestic product are disregarded. We propose a random intercept model to address this gap. For large datasets, this approach not only provides identical estimates like a fixed-effects approach, but also allows for the estimation of exporter- and importer-invariant variables.     

The War in Ukraine,Agricultural Trade and Risks to Global Food Security

Intereconomics - Any calls to move towards a centrally planned economy or autarky are strongly advised against, as this would only be to the detriment of food security in the Global South.     

Preference Erosion – The Case of Everything But Arms and Sugar

While the European Union's Everything But Arms (EBA) agreement has granted unlimited preferential access to the European market for the least developed countries (LDCs) since 2001, the sugar sector has been exempted for the first years. Only from 2009 on, the LDCs were entitled to export an unlimited amount of sugar to the EU, receiving the intervention price. The expected increase in sugar imports led the EU to substantially reduce the intervention price, besides other measures. This caused a disadvantage for countries which had been granted preferential access to the European market already: the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries. Our paper quantifies this erosion of preferences, employing a gravity framework. In terms of methodology we are addressing two fundamental problems well known in the gravity literature. The occurrence of excess zeros in the dependent variable of such disaggregated data is tackled with the employment of the scale‐independent negative binomial quasi generalised pseudo maximum likelihood estimator. The problem of identification is addressed by modelling the policy change with the continuous preference margin instead of using dummy variables. We find that preference erosion did occur. The ACP countries were indeed negatively affected by the consequences following the introduction of the EBA.     

Nahrungssicherheit und Agrarspekulation: Was ist politisch zu tun?

This short essay on financial speculation with agricultural commodities offers (1) a survey on the real economy factors that caused recent hunger crises, (2) an overview of the academic research on the impact of index-based financial speculation on agricultural markets, and (3) a discussion of political measures that are appropriate — or inappropriate — for improving global food security.