Agricultural Trade Liberalization and Downstream Market Power: The Ad Valorem Case

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2010-12-06
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Hoque, Mohammad Mainul
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Exports of agricultural commodities to developed countries play a significant role in the economies of many developing countries. The elimination of import tariffs has the potential to benefit producers in the developing countries, but estimates of the extent of the gains from trade liberalization typically assume perfect competition. Significant concentration in the food processing and retailing sectors of the U.S. and the EU undermine the plausibility of this assumption in the case of agricultural trade, however. Sexton, Sheldon, McCorriston, and Wang (2007) develop a model of the effects of trade liberalization that accounts for the vertically-linked and concentrated characteristics of the developed countries’ food markets. Their analysis is limited to the case of a constant per unit tariff, however. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the effects of trade liberalization in the presence of downstream market power to the case of an ad alorem tariff, and we find important qualitative differences from the results for the unit tariff case.

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Agricultural trade liberalization and downstream market power: some extensions
( 2010-03-26) Hoque, Mohammad ; Schroeter, John ; Department of Economics (LAS)

Exports of agricultural commodities to developed countries play a significant role in the economies of many developing countries. The elimination of import tariffs has the potential to benefit producers in the developing countries, but estimates of the effect of trade liberalization typically assume perfect competition. Significant concentration in the food processing and retailing sectors of the U.S. and the EU undermine the plausibility of this assumption in the case of agricultural trade, however. Sexton, Sheldon, McCorriston, and Wang (SSMW, 2007) developed a model of the effects of trade liberalization that accounts for the vertically-linked and concentrated characteristics of the developed countries’ food markets. Their principal qualitative finding is that an analysis based on the assumption of competitive conduct will overstate the effects of trade liberalization if food processing and retailing firms exercise market power. This result is sensitive to their choice of functional forms, however, as this paper demonstrates with an analysis in which SSMW’s linearity assumption is replaced by constant elasticity specifications for supply and demand. We also extend the SSMW analysis by considering ad valorem tariffs, a case for which the results exhibit both qualitative and quantitative differences from those for the unit tariff case.

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This article is published as Hoque, Mohammad Mainul and Schroeter, John R. (2010) "Agricultural Trade Liberalization and Downstream Market Power: The Ad Valorem Case," Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization, Vol. 8: Iss. 1, Article 11. doi: 10.2202/1542-0485.1311. Posted with permission.

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