Explore the vast range of titles available.

This article estimates a worldwide aggregate supply response for key agricultural commodities— wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans—by employing a newly-developed multi-country, crop-calendar-specific, seasonally disaggregated model with price changes and price volatility applied accordingly. The findings reveal that, although higher output prices serve as an incentive to improve global crop supply as expected, output price volatility acts as a disincentive. Depending on the crop, the results show that own-price supply elasticities range from about 0.05 to 0.40. Output price volatility, however, has negative correlations with crop supply, implying that farmers shift land, other inputs, and yield-improving investments to crops with less volatile prices. Simulating the impact of price dynamics since 2006, we find that price risk has reduced the production response of wheat in particular—and to a lesser extent, rice—thus dampening price incentive effects. The simulation analysis shows that the increase in own-crop price volatility from 2006–2010 dampened yield by about 1–2% for the crops under consideration.

Mathematical programming models are widely used in agricultural sector analysis. However, the lack of micro-level data, as well as computational requirements, necessitate the aggregation of individual producers into representative units when working at the sectoral level. This usually leads to unrealistic extreme specialization in supply responses. In 1982, McCarl introduced the \"historical crop mixes\" approach to avoid extreme specialization. We extend this approach by generating additional synthetic crop mixes using supply response elasticities and systematically varied commodity prices. In addition to avoiding extreme specialization, this approach provides flexibility when future supply responses can be vastly different from past responses. An application to U.S. biofuel policy analysis is presented.

In a general model of trading networks with bilateral contracts, we propose a suitably adapted chain stability concept that plays the same role as pairwise stability in two-sided settings. We show that chain stability is equivalent to stability if all agents' preferences are jointly fully substitutable and satisfy the Laws of Aggregate Supply and Demand. In the special case of trading networks with transferable utility, an outcome is consistent with competitive equilibrium if and only if it is chain stable.

A rationale for public investment in rural roads is that households can better exploit agricultural and nonagricultural opportunities to employ labor and capital more efficiently. Significant knowledge gaps persist, however, as to how opportunities provided by roads actually filter back into household outcomes as well as distributional consequences. This study examines the impacts of two rural road-paving projects in Bangladesh using a new quasi-experimental household panel data set surveying project and control villages before and after program implementation. A household panel fixed-effects methodology controlling for initial area conditions is used to estimate the impact of paved roads on household and individual outcomes and account for potential bias in program placement at the village level. Rural road investments are found to reduce poverty significantly through higher agricultural production, lower input and transportation costs, and higher agricultural output prices at local village markets. Rural road development has also led to higher secondary schooling enrollment for boys and girls, as compared to primary school enrollment. We find that road investments have also benefited the poor, meaning the gains are significant for the poor and in some cases disproportionately higher than for the nonpoor.

This paper uses a simple VAR for the USA and Euro area to analyse the underlying shocks of the early millennium slowdown, i.e. supply, demand, monetary policy and oil price shocks. The results of two identification strategies are compared. One is based on traditional zero restrictions and, as an alternative, an identification scheme based on more recent sign restrictions is proposed. The main conclusion is that the recent slowdown is caused by a combination of several shocks: negative aggregate supply and aggregate spending shocks, the increase of oil prices in 1999, and restrictive monetary policy in 2000. These shocks are more pronounced in the USA than the Euro area. The results are somewhat different depending on the identification strategy. It is illustrated that traditional zero restrictions can have an influence on the estimated impact of certain shocks.

This paper studies the causes of movements in inflation and output in Switzerland over 160 years between 1855 and 2015. Aggregate supply and demand shocks are identified in a structural VAR, and their evolution and effect on prices and output are discussed. Shocks to the Swiss economy have generally, although not uniformly, declined in magnitude over the sample period. The World Wars, the deflation of the 1920s and the Great Depression represented much larger shocks than either of 1970s break-up of Bretton Woods and move to floating exchange rates or the Global Financial Crisis.

This paper examines the distribution of climate change impacts across the sixteen Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZs) of Africa. We combine net revenue from livestock and crops and regress total net revenue on a set of climate, soil, and socio-economic variables with and without country fixed effects. Although African crop net revenue is very sensitive to climate change, combined livestock and crop net revenue is more climate resilient. With the hot and dry CCC climate scenario, average damage estimates reach 27% by 2100, but with the mild and wet PCM scenario, African farmers will benefit. The analysis of AEZs implies that the effects of climate change will be quite different across Africa. For example, currently productive areas such as dry/moist savannah are more vulnerable to climate change while currently less productive agricultural zones such as humid forest or sub-humid AEZs become more productive in the future.

This paper examines aggregate supply response of 19 selected crops in Algerian agriculture during the 1966-2018 period by employing cointegration analysis and error correction model (ECM). It tests whether there has been a long-run equilibrium relationship between agricultural outputs and prices, besides a confirmation about the responsiveness of agricultural supply to economic incentives (prices). Findings indicate that the long-run elasticities of all selected crops with respect to prices are statistically significant and mostly low, whereas short-run elasticities are lower, which appeals to the adequacy of adjustment to economic incentives. Furthermore, the results of the ECM confirmed the positive responsiveness to prices with differential rates of adjustment for selected crops, ruling out the applicability of a presumed perverse supply response in Algerian agriculture.

This paper studies a popular statistical model of permanent and transitory shocks to output using a set of arguably more plausible structural assumptions. One way to structurally interpret the model is by assuming aggregate demand has no long-run output effect. However, many economic theories are inconsistent with that assumption. Instead, we reinterpret the statistical model assuming a positive shock to aggregate supply lowers the price level and in the long run raises output while a positive shock to aggregate demand raises the price level. Under these assumptions, a puzzling finding from the empirical literature implies that a positive aggregate demand shock had a long-run positive effect on output in pre-World War I economies.

This paper uses the short-run restrictions implied by a simple aggregate demand-aggregate supply model as an aid in identifying structural shocks. Combined with the Blanchard-Quah restriction, it allows estimation of the slope of the aggregate supply curve, the variances of structural demand and supply shocks, and the extent to which structural demand and supply shocks are correlated. This paper finds that demand and supply shocks are highly correlated and that demand shocks possibly can account for as much as 82% of the long-run forecast error variance of real U.S. GDR