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Rozelle et al analyze the transformation of China's rural marketing system, trying to understand how well China's rural grain markets are functioning after a period of intensive liberalizing reforms and decisive attempts to curb these actions. Their research draws upon extensive fieldwork since the late 1980s in more than twenty provinces.

In 1587 the English Privy Council issued its first Book of Orders for the relief of dearth, a program of grain-market control that included forced delivery of private stocks to local markets in crisis periods. The policy has been described as an effective response to irrational hoarding and credited for a significant reduction in English grain-price variance. In contrast, I find support for an alternative profit maximizing model of storage. The occurrence of similar price stabilization in other European markets in the early seventeenth century is also demonstrated, suggesting English policy was not the cause.

Unlike the federal milk marketing order system, California's system includes a milk quota program. Oddly, this quota restricts neither production nor marketing. In aggregate, the quota program leads to more milk production than a typical marketing quota, but less milk than blend pricing without the quota. The California program generates more producer surplus and smaller welfare losses than a federal-style program without quota. When class 1 milk sales expand, production expands less under the quota program than with blend pricing without a quota. Finally, increases in aggregate quota lower production because they lower the marginal price of milk facing producers.

The U.S. peanut program restricts domestic sales with poundage quota but allows surplus production to be exported or crushed. Empirical analysis of North Carolina peanut production reveals that the marginal (and lower) price received by production above quota, that is the world price, is far more important in determining acreage than is the inframarginal subsidy of the quota support price.

Veeman discusses the nature and impact of pressures to adjust agricultural marketing policy and the consequent changes in agricultural marketing boards that have occured in recent years in Canada.

In this study we analyze recent and proposed maize marketing reforms in Zambia. To capture the effects of changing transport systems, we use a continuous-space model in place of the traditional point-representation model of Takayama and Judge. This method permits us to use prereform data on supply, demand, and transport costs to infer both intra- and interregional effects of liberalization and shows that the welfare gains from liberalization are larger than commonly thought. These results provide policy makers with estimates of the magnitude of change associated with alternative reform programs, beyond what would be available from a conventional approach.

Mexico's attempt to deregulate its sorghum market in 1990 was unsuccessful because policy analysts failed to consider the seasonal and spatial dimensions of trade. In this paper I present a detailed, seasonal, and spatially dissaggregated nonlinear programming model of the Mexican sorghum market calibrated with survey data of storage and transport costs in Mexico, and compare the results obtained with models that ignore these characteristics. The comparison demonstrates that the failure to incorporate these costs in trade models may lead to misleading conclusions and inappropriate policies.

A stated preference approach is used to predict likely responses to market reform in Zimbabwe. A random utility model is estimated using data on consumers' stated preferences for alternative types of maize meal. The model is used to predict demand patterns resulting from market reforms. Predicted demand is then compared with actual demand following market reforms. An analysis of the welfare effects of alternative policy scenarios shows that coupling the removal of consumer maize subsidies with improved access to a broader range of maize meal products ameliorated many of the adverse effects of subsidy removal, especially for lower-income groups.