Dynamic Interrelationships in Hard Wheat Basis Markets

Basis values for hard red spring (HRS) wheat have escalated radically, experienced extraordinary levels of volatility (risk), were subject to a squeeze during 2008, and all these have important implications for market participants. These are particularly important to marketers in the Northern Great Plains in the United States, as well as for Canadian marketers as they confront deregulation in wheat marketing and will be exposed to these risks. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dynamic relationships and interdependencies among terminal market basis values for milling. Specifically, we seek to identify factors impacting basis values for 13%, 14%, and 15% protein HRS wheat in addition to the intermarket wheat spread between Minneapolis and Kansas City wheat futures. We specify a vector autoregression (VAR) model to explore these relationships. Exogenous structural variables are specified in addition to dynamic interrelationships including seasonal and intertemporal variability and dynamic interdependencies among these markets and relationships. Results of interest are that: (1) basis values for these markets have been trending up and have become more volatile; (2) factors impacting this variability are the protein level in HRS, production of hard red winter (HRW), and Canadian wheat (on high protein basis); (3) HRW protein supplies are not significant in the basis equations, but, do impact the intermarket wheat futures spread; (4) quality factors have a significant impact on basis values, notably vomitoxin, falling numbers, and absorption. Dynamic interrelations are also important in that all prices converge quickly toward a long‐term equilibrium. In addition, there are seasonal impacts, dynamic basis interactions, trends, and lagged impacts of protein levels.     

AGRICULTURAL PRICE POLICY,FOOD AID AND INPUT SUBSIDY REFORMS IN BURKINA FASO

This paper examines the agrarian decline in Burkina Faso that prompted structural adjustment reforms by the World Bank and the IMF in the early 1980s. Official interventions in the cereals, cotton and fertiliser sectors are examined, and an analysis made of regional impacts of the proposed reforms on producers and consumers. Counter-factual simulations with a multi-region, multi-commodity agricultural sector model are used to evaluate three policies: eliminating input subsidies, increasing official market commodity prices, and reducing food aid imports. Model results show that these reforms would improve agricultural-sector performance, but depend on cotton exports to pay for fertiliser, contrary to government self-sufficiency objectives. Relaxing capacity constraints on official marketing operations would also need to be eliminated to achieve reform objectives.     

Does China’s ‘increasing versus decreasing balance’ land-restructuring policy restructure rural life? Evidence from Dongfan Village,Shaanxi Province

China’s ‘increasing versus decreasing balance’ land-restructuring policy is an innovative, top-down institutional land reform. Using the case study method, this study reviews the policy by examining its restructuring impacts on rural life. By deconstructing the procedures involved in the transfer of land development rights, we clarify that the economic benefits obtained from the trade of land development rights fund the entire project. Thus, the allocation of these economic benefits plays a pivotal role in restructuring rural living, production and ecology. We further analyze the case of Dongfan in Shaanxi Province, and our results show that approximately 60% of the economic benefit was used to demolish and re-construct settlements for peasants, while less than 25% was reserved for the development of rural industries. This distorted benefit allocation stemmed from the local governments’ pursuit of an increased quota for construction land use, which consequently generated weak impacts on restructuring rural life in Dongfan. Although their living conditions have improved, the outflow of peasants persists, thus producing a second round of village hollowing. The results of the policy indicate a need to pay more attention to rural industrial development in future programs and to examine the possibility for more radical land reforms in China, which could serve as a positive reference for village renewal and poverty alleviation in other countries.     

Agricultural land protection in China: a case study of local governance in Zhejiang Province

China's rapid economic development following the 1978 reforms has resulted in significant economic, social and environmental change. One consequence of this change has been the accentuation of an existing trend of agricultural land loss and degradation. Although the 1978 reforms and their impacts have been subjected to considerable scrutiny, relatively little research has been directed towards the relationship between the evolution of local government structures and practices and the implementation of agricultural land protection policies. This paper presents an analysis of this relationship in Huzhou Municipality, Zhejiang Province. Zhejiang Province is situated on the eastern seaboard and exhibited the highest average annual per capita growth in China between 1978 and 1995. Huzhou Municipality is a growth centre in the northern part of the province. A synthesis of the factual knowledge and perceptions of 40 key-informants suggests that despite the development of a comprehensive legal framework for agricultural land protection, the interpretation of policy at local levels continues to permit the loss of agricultural land (and attendant environmental costs) to be traded-off against increased economic growth. This suggests a need to re-evaluate the role of local levels of government in China with respect to agricultural land protection issues; to look as much at the ways policies are implemented as at policies themselves. The devolution of administrative responsibility in China and the increasing influence of powerful local economic interests will provide an impetus for such a re-focussing of research at local levels.     

Impacts of Low-Cost Land Certification on Investment and Productivity

New land reforms are again high on the policy agenda and low-cost, propoor reforms are being tested in poor countries. This article assesses the investment and productivity impacts of the recent low-cost land certification implemented in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, using a unique household and farm-plot-level panel data set, with data from before and up to eight years after the reform. Alternative econometric methods were used to test and control for endogeneity of certification and for unobserved household heterogeneity. Significant positive impacts were found, including effects on the maintenance of soil conservation structures, investment in trees, and land productivity.     

Economic and Household Impacts of Projected Policy Changes for the Irish Agri‐food Sector

The policy environment for the Irish agri‐food sector could change rapidly in the coming decade. A potentially positive factor will be the elimination of milk quotas in 2015, although a potentially negative factor will be further trade liberalisation and increased import competition. These changes come on top of the move to decouple direct aids to farmers in 2005 as part of the Mid‐Term Review of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy agreed in 2003. This paper examines these reforms and their impacts on the Irish economy and income distribution using a CGE model particularly rich in detail on the agri‐food sectors, differentiated household groups, and agricultural policy instruments including their links to productive factors and households. The results suggest that the past and projected changes in the policy environment have, in sum, a small positive impact on GDP and household income. However, the gains and losses are unequally distributed across sectors and household groups due to the highly differentiated distribution of support and protection. Although all households generally gain from the sequence of policy reforms in the long run, some experience strong adverse effects from particular reforms and in the medium term.     

Links between economic liberalization and rural resource degradation in the developing regions

This paper examines evidence of the effects of economic liberalization and globalization on rural resource degradation in developing countries. The principal resource effects of concern are processes of land use change leading to forestland conversion, degradation and deforestation. The main trends in globalization of interest are trade liberalization and economy-wide reforms in developing countries that have 'opened up' the agroindustrial sectors, thus increasing their export-orientation. Such reforms have clearly spurred agroindustrialization, rural development and economic growth, but there is also concern that there may be direct and indirect impacts on rural resource degradation. The direct impacts may occur as increased agricultural activity leads to conversion of forests and increased land degradation from 'unsustainable' production methods. However, there may also be indirect effects if agroindustrial development displaces landless, near-landless and rural poor generally, who then migrate to marginal agricultural lands and forest frontier regions. This paper explores these direct and indirect effects of globalization and agroindustrialization on rural resource degradation both generally, plus through examining case study evidence. The paper focuses in particular on the examples of structural adjustment, trade liberalization and agricultural development in Ghana, and maize sector liberalization in Mexico under North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).     

CAP Reforms in the 1990s and their Price and Welfare Implications: The Case of Wheat

We use a nonlinear commodity market model to assess, theoretically and empirically, the impacts of recent reforms of the CAP on prices and economic welfare in the EU. The empirical analysis is based on an aggregate structural econometric model of the EU wheat economy and its links to the rest of the world. Instability issues are also investigated. Impacts of CAP reforms on the variance of domestic and world prices are analysed and a Monte Carlo simulation is used to evaluate uncertainty in the model's welfare computations. Recent reforms led to a net welfare gain within the EU during the period 1993–2000. Additional budgetary costs are less than the welfare gains of consumers and producers. Producers gained as lower price support was overcompensated by additional direct payments.     

Has China’s new round of collective forest reforms caused an increase in the use of productive forest inputs?

Forestland tenure and financial incentives are the most important policy issue to sustainable forest resource management. The new wave of reform of collective forestland tenure (NRCFT) has been launched since 2003 and the governmental matching reform measures (MRMs) for the NRCFT have been introduced since 2009. The objective of these reforms is to enhance sustainable forest resource management in Chinese collective regions by encouraging rural households’ productive forest inputs. We use a unique dataset of 1778 sample households in 18 counties of nine provinces with six years and employ a fixed effects model with clustered standard errors. Our empirical results indicate that: 1) the NRCFT has increased households’ forestland area of different tenure types, and the effects of the MRMs on rural households’ labor input and production expenditures for forestry purposes are generally positive, especially household used forestland as collateral for a loan and afforestation or reafforestation subsidy and reform of Annual Allowance Cut (AAC) have significantly contributed to increase in the use of productive forest inputs; 2) the NRCFT and the MRMs have different impacts on the use of productive forest inputs for different tenure forests, and these reforms have caused the most significant changes in rural households’ production decision changes for household responsibility forestland; 3) both the NRCFT and the MRMs have significant effects on rural households’ rent-in and rent-out forestland; and 4) forestland fragmentations have caused additional labor and investment inputs for rural households’ forest resource management and protection. And finally, market drivers and household and village characteristics factors also affect households’ decisions for productive inputs for their managing forests.     

中国水产品市场价格波动特征研究

文章基于2004年10月到2013年12月的月度时间序列数据,运用自回归条件异方差模型具体分析了我国水产品市场的价格波动状况。研究发现:我国水产品市场价格具有比较明显的集簇性;我国水产品市场价格波动受到前期波动的影响更大,外部条件的冲击对我国的水产品市场价格波动影响有限,高风险高回报的特征在我国水产品市场并没有得到具体的体现;但是水产品市场价格的波动率却存在杠杆效应,出现利好消息时,水产品市场价格指数的波动率的波动会减小。     

20世纪90年代的贫困缓解：中国和印度的比较分析

本文通过对中印两国的文献分析，对20世纪90年代两国的贫困缓解进行了比较研究，表明两国在缓解贫困的路上有很多共同之处。可以发现自从自由化改革以来，中印两国的绝对贫困水平已经降低。然而，两国的贫困分布都是不均的，不公平程度在增加，贫困越来越集中在几个地区和群体。由于两国都在进行经济改革，对缓解贫困中的这些共同的行为很值得进一步探讨。     

The impact of mining and smelting activities on property values: a study of Mount Isa city,Queensland, Australia

Much publicity has been given to the problem of high levels of environmental contaminants, most notably high blood lead concentration levels among children in the city of Mount Isa because of mining and smelting activities. The health impacts from mining‐related pollutants are now well documented. This includes published research being discussed in an editorial of the Medical Journal of Australia (see Munksgaard et al. 2010 ). On the other hand, negative impacts on property prices, although mentioned, have not been examined to date. This study rectifies this research gap. This study uses a hedonic property price approach to examine the impact of mining‐ and smelting‐related pollution on nearby property prices. The hypothesis is that those properties closer to the lead and copper smelters have lower property (house) prices than those farther away. The results of the study show that the marginal willingness to pay to be farther from the pollution source is AUS $13 947 per kilometre within the 4 km radius selected. The study has several policy implications, which are discussed briefly. We used ordinary least squares, geographically weighted regression, spatial error and spatial autoregressive or spatial lag models for this analysis.     

The impact of agricultural conservation easement on nearby house prices: Incorporating spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity

The impact of farmland under agricultural conservation easement (ACE) contract on the values of nearby residential properties is investigated using housing sales data in two Pennsylvania counties. ACE-protected farmland had a positive impact on nearby property values in one study county but a negative impact in the other. The paper also looks at the impact of forest land use, and discovers that preserved forest land had a positive impact on the nearby property values in both counties. House prices showed strong spatial correlation in both counties, and a spatial error components (SEC) model fit the data better than the OLS model, a spatial-lag model (SLM), or a spatial autoregressive error model (SEM). Geographically weighted regression (GWR) showed that the impact of ACE-protected farmland on nearby property values varied within one of the two study counties, with positive impacts in some parts of the county and negative impacts in other parts. The impact of forest cover on property values also varied, with positive impacts within both counties. A new hybrid GWR-SEC model is introduced that incorporates both spatial correlation in prices and spatial heterogeneity in the model parameters. Statistical goodness of fit measures showed that the GWR-SEC model fit better than the GWR model or a hybrid GWR-SEM model.     

Assessing a Policy Grab Bag: Federal Water Policy Reform

This article examines the economic impacts of policy alternatives for addressing allocative inefficiencies among agricultural, urban, and environmental uses of federal water. The Central Valley Project Improvement Act, composed of multiple incentive–based and command–and–control policies, forms the context for this analysis. Estimated multi–output agricultural revenue functions and urban water demand functions are incorporated into a nonlinear programming model designed to predict changes in water use, returns to agriculture, and urban consumer surplus. Results suggest that analysis that does not explicitly model policy instruments implemented at sub–optimal levels and, as part of a package of reforms, could over– or underestimate the costs, benefits, and effectiveness of each policy instrument.     

Property rights reform to support China’s rural ‐ urban integration: household‐level evidence from the Chengdu experiment

In 2008, as part of a national experiment, Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate migration restrictions. Results from a difference‐in‐difference analysis of the National Statistics Bureau's regular household survey suggest that the reforms increased consumption and income, in particular for less wealthy and less educated households, with estimated benefits well above the cost of implementation. Local labour supply increased with the young shifting towards agriculture and the old towards off‐farm employment. The reforms also contributed to higher agricultural yields and profits through three channels, namely: (i) greater rental market activity that transferred land to more productive producers; (ii) substitution of purchased inputs for labour; and (iii) a shift out of grains towards vegetables, corn, and oilseeds all of which offer higher levels of profitability. All of these findings are consistent with the notion that, without reforms, imperfections in factor markets undermined investment and functioning of land and labour markets, preventing high‐value peri‐urban land from being used most effectively and reducing job creation.     

Sustainability impact assessment using integrated meta-modelling: Simulating the reduction of direct support under the EU common agricultural policy (CAP)

Assessing the impact of macro-level policy driven land use changes on regional sustainability is an important task that can facilitate complex decision making processes of introducing reforms. The research work demonstrates the ability of Sustainability Impact Assessment Tool (SIAT), a meta-model, in conducting ex ante spatially explicit cross sectoral impact assessments of changes in common agricultural policy (CAP). The meta-model is able to appraise impacts of CAP amendments on land use and their repercussions on multiple indicators of sustainability. The presented study comprehensively analyses the possible impacts of discontinuing direct financial support to farmers under CAP. The simulations of the meta-model are able to reveal the land use changes both at EU and regional levels as well as to bring forth the subsequent changes in a number of indicators representing the regional sustainability (for five case study regions). In a nutshell, the simulations indicate that a reduction in direct support brings in general, a decrease in farmed area, an increase in forested land, less fluctuation in natural vegetation coverage, increase in abandoned arable land area and negligible changes in built-up area despite regionally diverging land use trends. The simulated changes in sustainability indicators for the study regions in consequence to these land use changes show that the discontinuation of subsidies evokes responses that are in general climate friendly (reduction in methane and N₂O emissions, diminishing energy use and reduction in global warming potential), economically beneficial (increase in gross value of agriculture) and socially desired (decrease in unemployment rate) as well as environmentally harmful (increase in pesticide use). Even though the appraisals of diversity indicators such as forest deadwood and farmland birds are not conclusive for all regions, the changes are positive for the former indicator and slightly negative for the latter in general. The trade-offs among these regional sustainability indicators using their directional associations are also presented for a comprehensive assessment of the impacts.     

Poverty and the Distribution of Land

Redistributive land reforms have begun to attract the attention of scholars and policy makers once again. In this paper, we review old arguments and bring them up-to-date in the light of recent research. We begin with the case in favour of redistributive reforms focusing on fragmented factor markets and systems of labour control, of which concentration of land ownership is but one aspect. We then examine land reform in practice, focusing on distinct regional features and outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the transition economies of the former Soviet bloc and, as examples of success, East Asia (including China and Vietnam). Next we discuss the macroeconomic context and the two-way direction of causality between a redistribution of productive assets and the overall performance of the economy. We underline the importance of weakening the system of labour control, eliminating landlord bias and correcting urban bias. Finally, we argue that a prominent feature of all successful land reforms has been a high degree of land confiscation; full compensation and various types of 'market friendly' land reform are unlikely to be successful.     

Assessing the Exchange Rate Sensitivity of U.S. Bilateral Agricultural Trade

This paper uses an autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration to examine the short- and long-run effects of exchange rate changes on bilateral trade of agricultural products between the United States and its 10 major trading partners. Results show that, in the long run, while U.S. agricultural exports are highly sensitive to bilateral exchange rates and foreign income, U.S. agricultural imports are mostly responsive to the U.S. domestic income. In the short run, on the other hand, both the bilateral exchange rates and income in the United States and its trading partners are found to have significant impacts on U.S. agricultural exports and imports.
Dans le présent article, nous avons utilisé un modèle autorégressif à retards échelonnés (autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration) pour examiner les effets à court et à long terme des variations de taux de change sur le commerce bilatéral des produits agricoles entre les États-Unis et ses dix principaux partenaires commerciaux. Les résultats ont montré que, à long terme, bien que les exportations agricoles des États-Unis soient très sensibles aux taux de change bilatéraux et au revenu étranger, les importations agricoles des États-Unis sont principalement sensibles au revenu intérieur des États-Unis. À court terme, par contre, les taux de change bilatéraux et le revenu des États-Unis et de ses partenaires commerciaux ont des répercussions considérables sur les exportations et les importations agricoles des États-Unis.     

Forty years of irrigation development and reform in China

This study reviews 40 years of irrigation development in China including the transformation of the institutional and incentive structures in irrigation management. After rural reforms in the 1970s, irrigation investments slowed until the late 1990s. In North China, farmers became major investors in groundwater irrigation, leading to property rights’ transfer of tube wells from collective to private ownership. Despite positive effects in cropping patterns, farmer income and development of groundwater markets, privatisation has accelerated groundwater table deterioration. Since the middle of 1990s, Water User Associations have replaced village collective management of surface irrigation. This approach was adopted by most provinces by early 2001 with mixed results; only institutions with water‐saving incentives realised efficient irrigation. The Government is reforming water price policies to provide water‐saving incentives to farmers while not hurting their income. While China has focused on water rights and markets, and despite regulations and pilot projects, full implementation of water rights has been slow. Research reveals greater policy scope for expanding irrigation technologies that generate real water saving to rural areas. Given pressure associated with water scarcity and concern for food security, further effective reforms in irrigation and policy incentives are expected. The Government has also initiated some pilot projects to resolve increasing water scarcity problems through adjusting agricultural production activities.     

论国有商业银行改革对企业和社会的影响

概述了我国国有商业银行近年来的一系列改革措施,分析了国有商业银行通过实施这些改革措施对企业及社会产生的巨大影响。分析表明,国有商业银行改革提高了企业自身的国际市场竞争力,改变了银行与企业之间的角色关系,促进了国有商业银行收购外资银行的进度,并且可以有效防控各类风险,确保国家经济建设可持续发展。