Potential demand for hedging by Australian wheat producers

The potential for hedging Australian wheat with the new Sydney Futures Exchange wheat contract is examined using a theoretical hedging model parametised from previous studies. The optimal hedging ratio for an `average' wheat farmer was found to be zero under reasonable assumptions about transaction costs and based on previously published measures of risk aversion. The estimated optimal hedging ratios were found by simulation to be quite sensitive to assumptions about the degree of risk aversion. If farmers are significantly more risk averse than is currently believed, then there is likely to be an active interest in the new futures market.Crop Production/Industries, Marketing, Risk and Uncertainty,

Economic Consequences of War: Evidence from Sri Lanka

We propose a theoretical and econometric framework to evaluate the impact of war on economic growth of a developing country with an open economy. The theoretical framework encompasses both the neoclassical and endogenous growth models. The econometric model is derived from the theoretical framework and an Autoregressive Distributed Lag framework is used for the estimation. We test this framework using Sri Lankan data. The war had significant and negative effects both in the short and long-run (annual average of 9% of GDP). High returns from investment in physical capital did not translate in sizable positive externalities. No significant effects of openness on growth in the long-run are found; however, effects are significant in the short- run. Inconsistent politically driven policies towards openness are the likely reason. As the ethnic conflict has finally come to an end, a policy framework with appropriate institutional reforms is needed for rapid growth and development.

MONTE CARLO EVIDENCE ON COINTEGRATION AND CAUSATION

The small sample performance of Granger causality tests under different model dimensions, degree of cointegration, direction of causality, and system stability are presented. Two tests based on maximum likelihood estimation of error-correction models (LR and WALD) are compared to a Wald test based on multivariate least squares estimation of a modified VAR (MWALD). In large samples all test statistics perform well in terms of size and power. For smaller samples, the LR and WALD tests perform better than the MWALD test. Overall, the LR test outperforms the other two in terms of size and power in small samples.Causality tests, Cointegration, Likelihood ratio, Wald statistic, Monte Carlo Experiments, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Los ingresos reales y sus agregados en América Latina y el Caribe ¿Una historia de Convergencia?

Real incomes, consumption, government expenditures and investment for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) for the period 1971 to 2012 are studied using a recently released source of data. Although growth in real incomes have not been uniform across all countries, for a large majority both income and consumption have been increasing since the beginning of this century. The trends indicate increasing prosperity which could lead to welfare gains if a sustained effort is made to reduce income inequality. The patterns in real investment and government consumption are more heterogeneous across countries. The majority of the South American economies, Panama, Mexico and most Caribbean economies have either maintain or increase real levels of investment. Government expenditures have been more varied; however, there is some evidence that after the global financial crises (2007-2008) a few economies increased real government expenditures when investment shares decreased.A partir de una base de datos cuyo acceso fue recientemente liberado, se estudian las variables de ingreso real, el consumo, la inversión y gasto del gobierno para los países de América Latina y el Caribe (ALC) en el período 1971-2012. Aunque el crecimiento de los ingresos reales no ha sido uniforme en todos los países, para una gran mayoría tanto los ingresos como el consumo se han incrementado desde el comienzo de este siglo. Las tendencias indican un aumento de la prosperidad que podría conducir a ganancias de bienestar si se realiza un esfuerzo sostenido para reducir la desigualdad de ingresos. Los patrones de inversión real y el consumo público son más heterogéneos. La mayoría de las economías de América del Sur, Panamá, México y la mayoría de las economías del Caribe han mantenido o incrementado los niveles reales de inversión. Los niveles de gasto de gobierno han sido más variados. No obstante hay algunas evidencias de que después de la crisis financiera mundial (2007-2008) algunas economías aumentaron el gasto público real cuando los niveles de inversión disminuyeron

Interactions of Source State and Market Price Trends for Cattle of Korean, Japanese and USA Market Specifications

This study analyses the trends in the real prices of steers destined for the Japanese and Korean market, and cows destined for the USA market when sold in Queensland (QLD) or New South Wales (NSW). The aim of this paper is to explore how these prices have influenced each other when faced with the same overall economic and climatic conditions. A Vector Autoregressive model is first estimated to find linkages across six price series defined by source and destination. A Seemingly Unrelated Regressions Model for the real price series is then estimated including lagged prices of linked markets and indicators of macroeconomic and climatic conditions. From our empirical analysis, we find strong evidence of mean-reverting real prices, indicating they can be predicted by their historical mean. Further, the historical mean prices paid in QLD are higher than those paid in NSW for the Korean and US market cattle specifications. The price of cattle of Japanese market specification sold in NSW is solely determined by world conditions and historical values, and it influences directly or indirectly all other markets. The price trends for cattle of US market specifications do not seem to predict movements in the Japanese or Korean markets. This is expected as the Japanese market is a premium market while the US market accepts cattle from a wider range of specifications. This study does not find a systematic relationship between these prices and movements, the Southern Oscillation Index, the Asian financial crises, or the Australian Business Cycle

Measuring Spillovers from Alternative Forms of Foreign Investment

Much of the endogenous growth literature has dwelled on evaluating the spillover effects of trade on growth, but much less efforts have been directed towards tracing and quantifying the spillover effects of foreign investments. This paper, in incorporating the effects of various types of foreign investments, namely foreign direct investment (FDI), foreign portfolio investment (FPI) and other foreign investment (OFI) fills this gap in the literature. Adopting the stochastic frontier approach, this paper constructs an OECD frontier based on a panel dataset of 20 OECD countries over the 1981-2000 period. Spillover effects of FDI, FPI, OFI and trade are gauged by their respective contributions towards reducing technical inefficiencies, which are represented by the distance of each country from the constructed frontier. Results from the multiple models examined in the paper indicate that inflows of foreign investment and trade have been instrumental in reducing inefficiencies across OECD countries, whereas outflows of foreign investment exacerbate inefficiencies. The study also confirms some previous findings that the spillover effects of FDI inflows are larger than that of trade but does not find evidence in favour of the view that the spillover effects of trade are overestimated when FDI flows are excluded from the analysis. Moreover, the impact of FDI inflows is larger than those of FPI and OFI inflows. The importance of absorptive capacities of host economies in capturing spillover gains from FDI inflows is also examined. Amongst the various measures of absorptive capacity considered, only human capital was found to be important.

Constructing Internationally Comparable Real Income Aggregates by Combining Sparse Benchmark Data with Annual National Accounts Data. A State-Space Approach

The importance of availability of comparable real income aggregates and their components to applied economic research is highlighted by the popularity of the Penn World Tables. Any methodology designed to achieve such a task requires the combination of data from several sources. The first is purchasing power parities (PPP) data available from the International Comparisons Project roughly every five years since the 1970s. The second is national level data on a range of variables that explain the behaviour of the ratio of PPP to market exchange rates. The final source of data is the national accounts publications of different countries which include estimates of gross domestic product and various price deflators. In this paper we present a method to construct a consistent panel of comparable real incomes by specifying the problem in state-space form. We present our completed work as well as briefly indicate our work in progress.

SELECTING THE "BEST" PREDICTION MODEL: AN APPLICATION TO AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVES

A credit scoring function incorporating statistical selection criteria was proposed to evaluate the credit worthiness of agricultural cooperative loans in the Fifth Farm Credit District. In-sample (1981-1986) and out-of-sample (1988) prediction performance of the selected models were evaluated using rank transformation discriminant analysis, logit, and probit. Results indicate superior out-of-sample performance for the management oriented approach relative to classification of unacceptable loans, and poor performance of the rank transformation in out-of-sample prediction.Agribusiness,

Measuring Efficiency externalities from Trade and Alternative Forms of Foreign Investment

The literature has concentrated on evaluating technological spillovers from trade and inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Little effort has been directed towards identifying efficiency externalities arising from international linkages. We evaluate these for a sample of 20 OECD countries between 1982 and 2000 using a stochastic frontier approach. The analysis includes trade, inflows and outflows of FDI, foreign portfolio investment (FPI), and other foreign investment (OFI), and a measure of the absorptive capacities of host economies. We find trade and all foreign investment inflows to lead to increased efficiency. Outflows of FDI are found to exacerbate inefficiency.