The effects of EU corn, cotton, and sugar beet policies on Greek producers: a multimarket analysis

This article examines the welfare effects of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) corn, cotton, and sugar beet regimes practiced in Greece after its 1981 entry into the European Union. Since Greek farmers produce corn, cotton, and sugar beets on the same land in different years, we model these markets as horizontally linked. By incorporating the demand for corn in our model, we take into account that corn is used as feed in livestock production. We use line integral theory to properly deal with the complications of welfare measurement in a multimarket setting. We estimate producer welfare effects of Greek corn, cotton, and sugar beet policy, and use bootstrapping techniques to obtain confidence intervals for the welfare measurements. Our analysis indicates that the income transfers to Greek farmers, (corn, cotton, and sugar beet growers as well as livestock producers considered as a total), rose between 1981 and 1992. The 1992 CAP reform led to a stabilization of income transfers to crop farmers, and lessened the negative impact on livestock producers. Copyright 2005 International Association of Agricultural Economics.

Non-parametric Modelling of Spatial Price Relationships

We apply non-parametric methods to a consideration of price transmission processes within US egg markets at the turn of the nineteenth century. Gordon (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 7833, 2000) labelled this as an era of 'Great Inventions' which contributed to the subsequent years of significant productivity growth and noted that the development of mechanical refrigeration and transportation technologies played an important role in this growth. Our models present certain advantages relative to parametric models traditionally employed in price transmission analyses. We compare results derived from local polynomial modelling with those obtained using non-linear threshold models. Both techniques suggest that US egg markets were interrelated at the turn of the nineteenth century. However, non-parametric techniques often suggest a higher degree of price transmission than that implied by threshold models. Results also suggest that threshold models may have difficulties in adequately capturing price relationship dynamics, especially when these are of a highly nonlinear nature. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Has the Canada-US trade agreement fostered price integration?

C22, F14, F15,