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Global wine markets, 1961 to 2009: a statistical compendium

This volume revises, updates, and expands the volume first published in 2004 by the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation for the University of Adelaide and Monash University and re-published as: Wittwer, G. and K. Anderson, Global wine markets, 1961 to 2003: a statistical compendium, Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2009.

Re-examining policies for food security in Asia

In the wake of recent food price spikes, plus growing demands for food in emerging Asia and for biofuels in Europe and the United States, governments are re-examining their strategies for dealing with both short-term and long-term food security concerns. This paper argues that long-run trends in real agricultural prices have policy implications for food security that are at least as important as those related to short-lived spikes around trend prices. The paper therefore summarizes recent projections of markets to 2030 under various scenarios, and then reviews evidence on how trade policy restrictions typically are altered to insulate domestic markets from short-run fluctuations in international prices around their long-run trends. That provides a firm empirical basis for re-examining the effectiveness and efficiency of various policy options for ensuring food security in Asia and elsewhere. Those options include boosting agricultural productivity growth rates to deal with long-run concerns, and using more-appropriate domestic policy measures rather than trade policies to cope with price volatility.

How do governments respond to food price spikes ? lessons from the past

Food prices in international markets spiked upward in 2008, doubling or more in a matter of months. Evidence is still being compiled on policy responses over the following two years, but new time series estimates of government intervention for the previous five decades allow insights into past policy responses to price fluctuations and spikes. This paper reviews the distortionary impacts of policies used by governments attempting to stabilize their domestic food markets. It then focuses on policy responses in the mid-1970s, as reflected in domestic prices and various annual indicators of distortions to producer and consumer incentives, before drawing out some policy lessons.

What is the Appropriate Counterfactual When Estimating Effects of Multilateral Trade Policy Reform

Multilateral trade reforms, such as may emerge from the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda (DDA), tend to be phased in over a decade or so after agreement is reached. Given the DDA’s slow progress, that implementation may not be completed before the end of the next decade. Ex ante analysis of the DDA’s possible effects requires first modelling the world economy to 2030 and, in that process, projecting what trade-related policies would be by then if the DDA failed. Typically, modelers assume the counterfactual policy regime to be the status quo. Yet we know developing country governments tend to switch from taxing to assisting farmers in the course of economic development. This paper reveals how much difference it can make to include political economy-determined agricultural protection growth in the baseline projection. We reveal that difference by projecting the world economy to 2030 using the GTAP global economywide model with those two alternative policy regimes and then simulating a move to free trade in each of those two cases. To implement the alternative policy regimes, a series of national political econometric equations is used to project the policy changes for the most important agricultural crop and livestock products in a sample of 82 countries. With these equations and the projections of such variables as GDP and population to 2030, potential agricultural protection rates in 2030 are estimated. A prior step is involved in the analysis though. The GTAP model’s 2007 protection database has poor coverage of non-tariff barriers to agricultural imports and of export taxes. We therefore draw on the World Bank’s Distortions to Agricultural Incentives (DAI) database for 82 countries and use an Altertax procedure to recalibrate the version 8.1 GTAP 2007 database with those additional price-distortion data. The effects of removing the counterfactual price distortions in 2030 are shown to be much larger in the case where agricultural protection grows endoge...

Trade Barrier Volatility and Domestic Price Stabilization: Evidence from Agriculture

National barriers to trade are often varied to insulate domestic markets from international price variability, especially following a sudden spike. This paper explores the extent of that behavior by governments in the case of agricultural products, particularly food staples whose prices have spiked three times over the past four decades. It does so using new annual estimates since 1955 of agricultural price distortions in 75 countries, updated to 2008. Responses by food importers to upward price spikes are shown to be as substantial as those by food exporters, thereby weakening the domestic price-stabilizing effect of intervention by exporters. They also add to the transfer of welfare to food-surplus from food-deficit countries -- the opposite of what is usually thought of when considering inter-sector trade retaliation. Phasing down World Trade Organization-bound import tariffs toward their applied rates would help reduce the legal opportunities for food-deficit countries to raise their import restrictions when international prices slump. To date there is no parallel discipline in the World Trade Organization that limits increases in export restrictions when prices spike upward, however. Bringing such discipline through new World Trade Organization rules could help alleviate the extent to which government responses to exogenous price spikes exacerbate those spikes.

Annual estimates of distortions to agricultural incentives in europe's transition economies

This working paper summarizes annual estimates of covered product Nominal Rate of Assistance (NRAs), for each of the focus economies of Europes transition economies, their key distortion indicators defined in Anderson et al. (2008), and provides some summary statistics for the regions estimates. Four tables are provided for each country: (a) the NRA to individual farm products covered in the study and their weighted average, using as weights production valued at undistorted prices; (b) the RRA to producers of agricultural tradable, again using as weights production valued at undistorted prices, and the component parts of the RRA calculation; (c) the weights themselves for individual covered farm products and for the residual non-covered group of products, shown as percentages and so they sum to 100 percent; and (d) the trade status of each covered product each year. The NRA in the case of a product having just its output price distorted by government policies is the percentage by which the domestic producer price exceeds the price that would prevail under free markets, that is, the border price appropriately adjusted to account for differences in product quality, transport costs, processing costs, etc. A negative value indicates the domestic price is below that comparable border price.

Global wine markets, 1961 to 2009: a statistical compendium: Contents

This volume revises, updates, and expands the volume first published in 2004 by the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation for the University of Adelaide and Monash University and re-published as: Wittwer, G. and K. Anderson, Global wine markets, 1961 to 2003: a statistical compendium, Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2009.

Global wine markets, 1961 to 2009: a statistical compendium: List of charts

This volume revises, updates, and expands the volume first published in 2004 by the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation for the University of Adelaide and Monash University and re-published as: Wittwer, G. and K. Anderson, Global wine markets, 1961 to 2003: a statistical compendium, Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2009.

Global wine markets, 1961 to 2009: a statistical compendium: Statistical sources

This volume revises, updates, and expands the volume first published in 2004 by the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation for the University of Adelaide and Monash University and re-published as: Wittwer, G. and K. Anderson, Global wine markets, 1961 to 2003: a statistical compendium, Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2009.

Global wine markets, 1961 to 2009: a statistical compendium: Frontmatter

This volume revises, updates, and expands the volume first published in 2004 by the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation for the University of Adelaide and Monash University and re-published as: Wittwer, G. and K. Anderson, Global wine markets, 1961 to 2003: a statistical compendium, Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2009.