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The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) was a state-trading enterprise that controlled the sale and distribution of wheat and barley produced in Western Canada from 1935 to 2012. The CWB’s regulatory and bureaucratic structures have been investigated as sources of several market effects, including prices and spatial production patterns. We investigate the effects of the CWB on productivity using farm-level data, and identify how deregulation of the CWB affected total factor productivity (TFP) for CWB-regulated crops. Farm-level production and input data for 13,000 grain farms over 15 years are used to generate a within-farm difference-in-difference (DiD) estimator that identifies how relative TFP changed between CWB and non-CWB crops after deregulation. Cereal farm operators typically grow several (CWB and non-CWB) crops in a single season, allowing us to estimate production functions for multiple crops at the same farm in the same year. Our within-farm DiD empirical strategy identifies the effects of deregulation on changes in relative TFP between crops, while controlling for many of the confounding factors that complicate TFP measurement in other approaches, such as unobserved differences between farms and unobserved changes within farms over time. This research makes a methodological contribution to the productivity literature by developing a within-farm DiD estimator, and contributes to the understanding of how policy interventions affect farm-level productivity.

A number of major agricultural exporting countries responded to high food prices from 2007 to 2010 by imposing export restrictions on agricultural commodities in efforts to constrain domestic food-price inflation. These restrictions reduced the volume of internationally traded food, and exacerbated international price spikes. Net food importing countries were faced with growing import bills, and non-governmental organisations that target food security had to scale back programme commitments and appeal for increased funding. There have subsequently been a chorus of calls for the development of a formal international framework that could discipline the use of agricultural export restrictions; the agreements of the WTO have been targeted as a possible forum for such a framework. We present a framework in which the efficacy of such disciplines can be analysed, and conclude that constraints on agricultural export restrictions are not likely to be effective within the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Understanding.

High food prices in 2008 and 2010 generated concern about food security in developing countries. The number of food insecure people was estimated to have jumped significantly and food assistance donors were faced with unexpectedly high procurement bills. This paper discusses how high food prices affect the delivery of food assistance, focusing on recipient effects and on procurement decisions. Recent changes in Canadian food assistance policies are discussed in the context of high commodity prices, and food assistance flows during recent periods of high prices are reviewed. Two empirical investigations relating to high food prices are undertaken. First, the degree of price transmission from world markets to local and regional markets, where a growing share of food assistance is being purchased, is shown to vary widely across countries and provides some insulation for food assistance against world price shocks. Second, the degree to which donors substitute between important food assistance commodities when relative commodity prices change is examined. There is significant substitution between protein sources in food assistance baskets, but not between cereals.

There exists an extensive literature that attempts to identify important factors that determine trade policies. An understanding of these important factors could be useful when negotiating trade agreements, especially in agriculture, which is a relatively heavily supported industry. Limao and Panagariya (L&P, 2007) modify Grossman and Helpman’s (G&H, 1994) lobbying model in an attempt to understand why anti-trade bias (as opposed to pro-trade bias, which is predicted by the G&H (1994) model) is the predominant pattern in observed trade policy. L&P (2007) propose that governments seek to reduce inequality between sectors by modifying trade policies in a way that reallocates gross revenue from the larger to the smaller sector. We use measures of trade bias calculated in the World Bank Distortions to Agricultural Incentives database (Anderson and Valenzuela, 2008) in an effort to explain trade bias in agriculture. We find little empirical evidence that governments pursue agricultural trade policies to reduce inequality between net-importing and net-exporting sectors in agriculture. Lagged trade policies are significant determinants of current trade-distorting policy, suggesting the presence of policy persistence. We conclude that it is difficult to generalise determinants of trade-distorting policy across a wide and long panel of countries, and that specific knowledge of governments’ priorities are required to explain trade bias.

Negotiators from developed countries pushed hard for the inclusion of the TRIPS Agreement in the WTO set of agreements because it was viewed as a potentially effective method of coercing developing countries to strengthen their protection of intellectual property rights (IPR). We investigate whether the threat of cross-agreement retaliation, which could be authorized in disputes regarding the TRIPS Agreement, is effective in changing countries’ IPR protection regimes. The results from a panel empirical model suggest that both the TRIPS Agreement and the strength of trade ties with developed countries are important determinants of IPR protection, but that the vulnerability to potential trade losses through cross-agreement retaliation is not a uniformly significant determinant across geo-economic regions. We conclude that the threat of trade retaliation is just one important determinant of countries’ institutional protection of IPR.

Current Doha Development Agenda (DDA) World Trade Organisation negotiations include proposals that would affect the trade barriers that protect Canada’s chicken producers from foreign competition. This research analyses the effects of the most recent proposals to emerge from the DDA negotiation on Canada’s chicken industry. We develop a partial-equilibrium model that generates welfare effects for the Canadian chicken industry supply chain. We also introduce stochastic prices to evaluate the effects of world price instability on the Canadian chicken industry. The model is also adapted to represent chicken as two distinct products; white meat and dark meat. Simulation results suggest that the welfare effects of the DDA proposals on the Canadian chicken industry would be small, providing that chicken receives the sensitive products designation. Liberalisation leads to higher total welfare in the chicken industry, which is accounted for by consumer welfare that increases by a larger amount than producer welfare decreases. These results hold across models that incorporate risk and that differentiate products.

The proliferation of regional integration agreements (RIAs) over the past several years has led to significant changes in the global configuration of trade and investment activity. Multinational enterprises now face the prospect of multilateral trade liberalisation that could significantly affect the foreign direct investment (FDI) incentive structures that were established within the range of current RIAs. RIAs that provide preferential market access to member countries modify firms’ incentives to undertake FDI activities and can lead to various permutations of trade and investment creation and diversion. This article provides an analytical framework for understanding the implications of multilateral trade liberalisation for the incentive structures of firms to conduct FDI and discusses how multilateral liberalisation could undo many of the FDI activities that were initiated in response to previous RIAs.

We investigate the effectiveness of the TRIPS Agreement in triggering changes to countries' intellectual property rights (IPR) protection regimes in the empirical panel model that utilizes a range of aggregation strategies. The effects of the TRIPS agreement on the IPR protection vary across levels of development and geography. Developed countries where IPR protection regimes closely resembled TRIPS Agreement obligations before implementation, were not significantly affected. Developing countries significantly responded to the TRIPS Agreement by tightening IPR protection regimes. The empirical evidence suggests that the TRIPS Agreement has been successful in coercing WTO member countries to strengthen domestic protection of IPR., Draft version ‐ final version forthcoming in International Trade Journal

The food-aid community almost unanimously condemns policies that encourage crop production for fuel. Both food-aid donors and recipients are concerned that biofuels will increase foodgrain prices and leave donors unable to meet commitments. The effects of biofuel-induced higher cereal prices on food-aid recipients are complicated functions of several factors, each of which must be considered in an analysis of the effects of biofuel policies. These factors include the level of biofuel-induced price increases, changes in relative commodity prices, donor-recipient relationships and the sources from which food aid is procured. This article analyses the effects of biofuel policies on the food-aid supply chain and concludes that the more reliant a recipient is on emergency (vs. programme and project) food aid, the smaller will be biofuel-related decreases in shipments. Also, the larger is the share of maize (relative to wheat and rice) in a recipients’ food-aid basket, the more detrimental will be the impact of higher foodgrain prices. Movements toward local and regional food-aid procurement are unlikely to significantly insulate food-aid shipments from biofuel-related price increases.

A new Agreement on Agriculture from the Doha Development Agenda negotiations is certain to contain binding rules on food aid shipments. Negotiating parties are concerned that food aid has been used as a form of export competition policy, and they seek the use of coercive WTO legislation to prevent the disposal of surplus agricultural commodities as food aid. Current Uruguay Round food aid guidelines are contrasted with the most recent Doha Development Agenda proposals, and the prospective effectiveness of new rules is assessed. Food aid rules will be difficult to enforce within the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Understanding. Also, exogenous policy changes in donor countries are reducing the relevance of rules that target food aid as a means of surplus disposal. The future of international food aid governance in the event of a Doha Round collapse is also discussed.

The empirical investigation suggests that there exists an endogenous relationship between subsidy/credit shipments and food aid for wheat in the US. The empirical VAR demonstrates a contemporaneous increase in food aid shipments as alternative vents constrict. This result suggests that a trade agreement that disciplines export subsidies and credits may put upward pressure on food aid shipments as agricultural exporters vent the pressure of their domestic surpluses. The empirical results suggest that in the US wheat market the effects are not large. The same phenomenon has been noted in the case of skim milk powder by Margulis; skim milk powder would provide another interesting empirical case, were the data available.

This article outlines the shortcomings of current techniques to assess the effectiveness of agricultural commodity promotion campaigns; particularly their neglect of the dynamic nature of the underlying demand system. The dynamics that affect advertising effectiveness over time are illustrated, and the importance of cointegration in commodity markets is outlined. A dynamic, error-correction Almost Ideal Demand System is developed to accommodate the aforementioned dynamics and this model is applied to US meat data. Short and long-run elasticities for the dynamic model using Stone's price index are derived and estimated. The article also includes a discussion of the use of elasticities in policy decisions.