Agricultural Marketing Policy Papers
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/3495
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Item Regulating State Trading Enterprises in the GATT: An Urgent Need for Change? Evidence from the 2003-2004 U.S.--Canada Grain Dispute(MSU Extension, 2006-02) Smith, Vincent H.State Trading Enterprises (STEs) are one of the bete noirs of agricultural and other trade relations and trade negotiations. An STE is a government enterprises or quasi government enterprise that operates with special protections and/or privileges granted by its country’s central authority. STEs generally exist for one of two main reasons. Sometimes, as with many African parastatals, they are created to tax the domestic industry and/or imports for government revenue generation purposes (or income transfers to members of ruling elites). Alternatively, an STE’s mission is often to increase revenues or profits (though not necessarily both) from sales for domestic producers and/or processors and other marketing chain operations. In pursuing these revenue or profit objectives, STEs create trade distortions by implicitly levying tariffs on imports, taxing domestic sales, and subsidizing (or, on rare occasions, taxing) exports to different countries at different rates. They may also be vehicles through which domestic subsidies are more or less discretely funneled to producers, with corresponding implications for the effectiveness of disciplines on domestic supports. Hence, STEs are problematic in the context of trade negotiations.Item Harvest-Time Protein Shocks and Price Adjustment in U.S. Wheat Markets(MSU Extension, 2005-06) Goodwin, Barry K.; Smith, Vincent H.Dynamic relationships between three classes of wheat are investigated using threshold VAR models incorporating the effects of protein availability. Changes in the stock of protein are found to generate significant impulse responses in the price of hard red spring wheat and hard red winter wheat but not soft red wheat. These impulse responses to identical changes in protein stocks are larger when the absolute deviations of protein stocks from normal levels are large. Shocks to the prices of individual classes of wheat result in complex impulse responses in the prices of the other wheats. Notably, however, a shock to the price of hard red winter weak appears to result in little or no impulse response in the price of hard spring wheat, though, importantly, the opposite is not true.Item Agricultural Chemical Prices in Canada and the United States: A Case Study of Alberta and Montana(MSU Extension, 2004-12) Smith, Vincent H.; Johnson, James B.Differences in retail prices for similar or identical agricultural chemicals have been a source of controversy in the Prairie Provinces of Canada and the Northern Great Plains States of the United States since the mid-1990s. Such differences may exist because of differing pesticide regulations between the United States and Canada. Different regulations may inhibit trade between the two regions and isolate markets from one another. If this is the case, then regulatory harmonization that allows Canadian and U.S. agricultural producers to purchase agricultural chemicals in Canada or the United States would generally lead to harmonization of agricultural chemical prices.