Policy distortions in the segmented rice market:

"High production and export subsidies in developed countries and high protection in both developed and developing countries have distorted rice trade. This study estimates the impact of rice policy distortions on developing countries' rice production and trade potential. Because rice markets are highly segmented, major rice types are differentiated to estimate the impact of current and likely policy reforms. Analysis in long-grain, high-quality rice focuses on rice import and export markets in Latin America and shows that reduction of direct and implicit export subsidies in the US will benefit regional suppliers such as Argentina and Uruguay. Analysis of Indonesia's import market of ordinary long-grain rice, where protection is high, reveals that tariff hikes in this large importing country are in part a response to increased support from the exporting side. Level of domestic stocks also determines tariff movements. In the short/medium grain rice market, this study focuses on the highly supported and protected rice market in Japan and find that only aggressive rates of increase in import tariff-rate quota and reduction in production subsidies would have significant impact on import volume and price. Prices and trade would also be affected by a reduction of the high over-quota tariff." from Authors' Abstractexports, subsidies, Rice trade, Rice markets, tariffs, Imports,

Determinants of Intra-GCC Food Trade

Using panel data for six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries from 1995-2014, we assess the impacts of several major economic variables on intra-GCC food exports, and on GCC food exports to the world. The GCC customs union had minimal impact on intra-GCC food exports, but occasioned a significant reduction in GCC food exports. Unlike GCC food exports, intra-GCC food exports occurred among countries with similar relative factor endowments, in agreement with the Linder Hypothesis. Rising incomes and exchange rates played significant roles in both intra-GCC food exports and GCC food exports, while distance has lost its once-dominant role.This publication was made possible by the NPRP award (NPRP 6-064-4-001) from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation).Scopu

THE EXPORT MARKET FOR DIFFERENTIATED PROCESSED AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS: THE ROLE OF FACTOR PRICES AND FIXED COSTS

The theories of monopolistic competition and ¡°love for variety¡± contend that the differences in firms¡¯ prices and market shares arise from product differentiation, which is linked to firms¡¯ fixed costs. This paper reviews these theories and their implications for prices and market shares of firms from developing countries seeking to expand their exports of processed agricultural goods. The study proposes a model showing the role of the firms¡¯ costs as a source of product differentiation. Using econometric methods, the model estimates the firms¡¯ residual demand elasticities, which indicate the degree of product differentiation and market power. The model also determines the effects of the firms¡¯ own costs and competitors¡¯ costs on the residual demand and market shares. Case studies for cocoa products and roasted coffee in the U.S. import market are examined. Exporters to the U.S. include developing countries that produce the raw cocoa and coffee. The results show that high prices and large market shares are associated with high levels of product differentiation in these markets. Also, market shares increase with the level of fixed costs, which are measured by proxy as advertising expenditures. The implication for small firms in developing countries is that increasing the degree of product differentiation through increased investment in advertising or research and development could increase their market shares and their export revenues.International Relations/Trade,

A non-parametric approach to determine an efficient premium for drought insurance

Insurance to deal with prolonged drought periods in rural Africa requires a practical method to estimate accurate premium values that minimize economic losses. We use non-parametric methods to determine the risk non-neutral insurer’s premium for drought insurance on rain-fed crops. Premium values are estimated on the basis of percentage of the expected yield losses over the potential yields. Expected yield losses are estimated based on data on the levels of rainfall, potential evapotranspiration and water-holding capacity of the soil, and water requirement of the crop. Maize crop in West Kenya, and rice crop in the Central High Plains of Madagascar are taken as case studies. To check if farmer’s choice of starting seasons affects the expected yields and the values of premium, we employ forecasted yields for two different sowing dates (October vs. November) for maize, and two different transplantation dates (November vs. December) for rice. The mean-variance (E-V), the First-Degree Stochastic Dominance (FSD), and the Second-Degree Stochastic Dominance (SSD) efficiency criteria are used to rank each pair of distributions. Results show that an insurer for maize production in Western Kenya would require a premium value between 43 and 55% of the potential yields to fully cover the loss caused by lack of rainfall. Under E-V and FSD, the two yield distributions cannot be ranked, but under SSD the yield distribution of the October-sown maize dominates that of November. For lowland rice in the Central High Plains of Madagascar, all three efficiency criteria indicate that the yield distribution of the December-transplanted rice dominates that of November and the premium values are less than 4 % of the potential yields

Bounded model checking for asynchronous concurrent systems

Complex hardware systems become more and more ubiquitous in mission critical applications such as military, satellite, and medical to name but a few. In such applications, reliability remains a primary concern because a failure that occurs during their normal operations might produce important catastrophes like loss of life or loss of money. All these failures are often caused by minuscule bug that exists inside the software which controls the systems, or within the hardware itself. In addition, most of these systems cannot be interrupted while working, even for a few seconds a year, making it difficult to repair bugs found during their normal operations. The main purpose of this work is to build efficient verification techniques for asynchronous concurrent systems. Because of the pivotal roles these systems assume in a given application, designers of such systems must keep development and maintenance costs under control and meet nonfunctional constraints on the design of the system, such as cost, power, weight, or the system architecture by itself. But most importantly, they must assure their customer as well as the certification authorities that both the design and its implementation are correct. Otherwise, they may end up shipping unsafe systems to the market, and the consequences of this action would be catastrophic. To achieve this goal, designers need efficient methods and tools to assist them in verifying the correctness of the design. In this thesis we focus on a symbolic model checking technique called bounded model checking (BMC). BMC is a method targeted mainly at finding bugs in a system. It answers the questions whether there exists a counterexample, shorter than a given length, that violates a given property. During a BMC operation each execution path is encoded into Boolean formula, and the problem is reduced to satisfiability checking of the formula. Therefore, the operation consists mainly in constructing a Boolean formula that is satisfiable if and only if such a counterexample exists. We model our systems with transition systems (TSs). In particular, we are mainly interested in synchronized product of TSs. Since concurrent systems are formed by a combination of several components communicating between each other, synchronized product of TSs is well-suited to capture the behavior of such systems. The executions of concurrent systems are commonly modeled using the so-called interleaving execution, which allows only one single event to fire at each step. However, due to the complexity of such systems inteleaving method will not only require many steps but also generate long formulas. In this work, we adopt another approach based on breadth-first search (BFS). In a BMC operation, the translation of the model into a Boolean formula is polynomial in the size of the model, but the solving time of the Boolean formula can be exponential in the size of the formula. Therefore, our research hypothesis is that we can improve the efficiency of BMC by generating succinct formula, and by minimizing the number of necessary steps during an execution. We introduce several BMC techniques aimed at improving the efficiency of BMC for asynchronous concurrent systems. The techniques are grouped in two main parts (i) techniques for checking reachability properties and (ii) techniques for checking properties written in linear temporal logic (LTL). In addition, we also propose some methods for minimizing the number of execution steps or bound. We implemented all these methods in a BMC toolset. At the end of the dissertation, we will discuss the experimental results we obtained.Postprint (published version

Competitiveness and trade potential of India’s dairy industry

"India has become the world’s largest milk producer but its dairy industry lacks market access. This paper determines how world dairy policy reforms would affect dairy production and trade in India and the competitiveness of its dairy industry. We measure nominal protection coefficient for India’s dairy products to determine level and change in competitiveness between 1975 and 2001. We estimate parameters of domestic demand for and supply of raw milk and whole milk powder to determine how a world price increase would affect domestic milk production and whole milk powder exports. Results show that India’s dairy products lack export competitiveness. But with less distorted world dairy markets, India could be competitive and would emerge as a net exporter of whole milk powder, benefiting dairy industries and milk producers in India." -- Authors' AbstractPRIFPRI3; ISI; Theme 11; Subtheme 11.2; The future of smallholder farmingMTID; ND

A Contribution to the Analyses of the Effects of Foreign Agricultural Investment on the Food Sector and Trade in Sub-Saharan Africa

The growing interest of foreign investors in Sub-Saharan Africa’s vast agricultural potential raises debates about the investment impacts on the food sector and the economy at large. This paper analyzes the likely effects of foreign agricultural investment in Sub-Saharan Africa with a focus on the impacts on the food sector by simulating the effects of the reduction of investment risks triggering an entry of foreign investment flow. The analysis employs the Global Trade Analysis and Policy (GTAP) model and simulates three investment scenarios that affect land uses, labour market conditions, and technological progress. The data are aggregated over three main sectors: food, manufacturing and services. Simulation results show that although foreign agricultural investment in Sub-Saharan Africa would lead to an increase in food prices and a decline in domestic food supply that would in turn cause an increase in food imports, the increases in factor returns and in employment would boost households’ real income to offset the loss from higher food prices. The positive income effects would be magnified if the agricultural investment brought technological progress to the food sector. Moreover, foreign agricultural investment would widen the current account deficit but improve terms of trade, whose effect on total welfare is large. The improvement of the terms of trade in the model is mainly due to a strong increase in the export price of tradable goods from the manufacturing sector. The service sector would unambiguously experience the strongest output growth as it benefitted from the formation of capital goods. Overall, the simulation results show that entry of foreign agricultural investment would generate a net welfare gain

A Contribution to the Analyses of the Effects of Foreign Agricultural Investment on the Food Sector and Trade in Sub-Saharan Africa

The growing interest of foreign investors in Sub-Saharan Africa’s vast agricultural potential raises debates about the investment impacts on the food sector and the economy at large. This paper analyzes the likely effects of foreign agricultural investment in Sub-Saharan Africa with a focus on the impacts on the food sector by simulating the effects of the reduction of investment risks triggering an entry of foreign investment flow. The analysis employs the Global Trade Analysis and Policy (GTAP) model and simulates three investment scenarios that affect land uses, labour market conditions, and technological progress. The data are aggregated over three main sectors: food, manufacturing and services. Simulation results show that although foreign agricultural investment in Sub-Saharan Africa would lead to an increase in food prices and a decline in domestic food supply that would in turn cause an increase in food imports, the increases in factor returns and in employment would boost households’ real income to offset the loss from higher food prices. The positive income effects would be magnified if the agricultural investment brought technological progress to the food sector. Moreover, foreign agricultural investment would widen the current account deficit but improve terms of trade, whose effect on total welfare is large. The improvement of the terms of trade in the model is mainly due to a strong increase in the export price of tradable goods from the manufacturing sector. The service sector would unambiguously experience the strongest output growth as it benefitted from the formation of capital goods. Overall, the simulation results show that entry of foreign agricultural investment would generate a net welfare gain

Effects of a Mix of Taxes and Subsidies on the Mix of Products: Substitution vs. Endowment Effects Applied to the Agricultural Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa

Decision making often relies on understanding the interactions among and effects of a mix of policies. I reviewed the primal and dual solutions of a multi-input multi-output model and introduced policy distortions as separate from price parameters to estimate the cross-effects and, more important, the substitution and endowment effects of policies on the mix of production. The model is applied on a detailed yet unbalanced dataset of agricultural taxation and subsidies during 1960-2005 in eighteen SubSaharan African countries. The commodities were split into cash commodity, importable food and nontradable food categories. Results showed that changes in the ratio of taxes on two commodities led to substitution through cross-effects. The cross-effects were, however, counterintuitive and distributed unevenly. A higher increase in taxation on cash commodities relative to importable food caused relatively more harm to the production of importable food than to the production of cash commodity, as the former is more price- and distortion-elastic. I also found that distortion’s impact through substitution among crops was relatively small; the rest of the impact, about 60-to 70% of the total effects on output level, was attributed to the endowment effects. These results have several implications for diversification and food security. In a mixed output system, the relative level of assistance or taxation in comparison with subsidy or tax on other commodities matters. The priority before targeting any subsector for assistance should be to increase the amount of and access to resources to the whole agricultural sector; reshuffling resources without increasing them may provoke unintended consequences, as the crops have different policy responses. Reducing taxation on cash crops may well help reduce food insecurity, and lump-sum subsidies would be preferable to direct price supports