natural gas price effects in china based on the cge model abstract natural gas is a clean energy source with many benefits and its proportion in the energy consumption structure in china has been gradually increasing over the recent years since the price of natural gas in china has been controlled and maintained at a relatively low level by the government reforming the natural gas industry in china has been the matter of much attention in light of its macroeconomic effects on the overall economy using the computable general equilibrium model and the 2012 social accounting matrix the results show increases in natural gas prices lead to an increase in the consumer price index cpi and lead to reductions in gdp the chemical industry sector is strongly influenced by a natural gas price increase furthermore chemical fertilizer manufacturing industry and chemical products manufacturing have very significant effects in china therefore the government may gradually establish and improve the management of natural gas price to avoid negative effects and implement a differential price as the industries exhibit different levels of resistance in response to natural gas price changes

united states export subsidies in wheat strategic trade policy or expensive beggar thy neighbor tactic this paper examines the domestic and international impacts of the u s export enhancement program eep for wheat eep uses targeted in kind subsidies to expand u s exports and was designed specifically to compete with subsidized exports from the european community ec we argue eep cannot be welfare improving for the u s even considering strategic trade theory we then model eep as an in kind constrained targeted export subsidy and determine its price quantity and budgetary effects empirical results show that no exporting country gains from eep and that the intended loser the ec is only slightly harmed we find the export subsidies generate only a small increase in u s wheat exports eep is an expensive program based on our estimates for 1988 government cost of additional wheat exports under eep reached 469 per metric ton

are asian real exchange rates stationary by applying the newly developed nonlinear stationary test advanced by kapetanios et al journal of econometrics 112 2003 359 in examining the stationary property of 11 asian real exchange rates this paper rejects unit root in 8 us dollar based and 6 japanese yen based rates whereas the augmented dickey fuller adf test has led to no rejection at all

a large scale linear complementarity model of the north american natural gas market abstract the north american natural gas market has seen significant changes recently due to deregulation and restructuring for example third party marketers can contract for transportation and purchase of gas to sell to end users while the intent was a more competitive market the potential for market power exists we analyze this market using a linear complementarity equilibrium model including producers storage and peak gas operators third party marketers and four end use sectors the marketers are depicted as nash cournot players determining supply to meet end use consumption all other players are in perfect competition results based on national petroleum council scenarios are presented

nonlinear purchasing power parity under the gold standard 1 introductionrecent theoretical analysis of purchasing power deviations see e g dumas 1992 sercu uppal and van hull 1995 and o connell and wei 1997 demonstrates how transactions costs or the sunk costs of international arbitrage induce nonlinear adjustment of the real exchange rate to purchasing power parity ppp globally mean reverting this nonlinear process has the important property of exhibiting near unit root behavior for small deviations from ppp since small deviations from ppp are left uncorrected if they are not large enough to cover the transactions costs or the sunk costs of international arbitrage a parametric nonlinear model suggested by the theoretical literature that captures the nonlinear adjustment process in aggregate data is the exponential smooth transition autoregression model estar of ozaki 1985 a smooth rather than discrete adjustment mechanism is motivated by the theoretical analysis of dumas 1992 also as postulated by terasvirta 1994 and demonstrated theoretically by berka 2002 in aggregate data regime changes may be smooth rather than discrete given that heterogeneous agents do not act simultaneously even if they make dichotomous decisions 1 recent empirical work e g michael nobay and peel 1997 taylor peel and sarno 2001 peel and venetis 2002 has reported empirical results that suggest that the estar model provides a parsimonious fit into a variety of data sets particular for monthly data for the interwar and postwar floating period as well as for annual data spanning 200 years as reported in lothian and taylor 1996 in addition nonlinear impulse response functions derived from the estar models show that although the speed of adjustment for small shocks around equilibrium will be highly persistent larger shocks mean revert much faster than the glacial rates previously reported for linear models rogoff 1996 in this respect the estar models provide some solution to the ppp puzzle outlined in rogoff 1996 2the estar model can also provide an explanation of why ppp deviations analyzed from a linear perspective appear to be described by either a nonstationary integrated i 1 process or alternatively described by fractional processes see e g diebold husted and rush 1991 taylor peel and sarno 2001 and pippenger and goering 1993 show that the dickey fuller tests have low power against data simulated from an estar model michael nobay and peel 1997 and byers and peel 2003 show that data that is generated from an estar process can appear to exhibit the fractional property that this would be the case was an early conjecture by acosta and granger 1995 given that the estar model has a theoretical rationale whereas the fractional process is a relatively nonintuitive one the fractional property might reasonably be interpreted as a misleading linear property of ppp deviations granger and terasvirta 1999 whereas the empirical work employing estar models provides some explanation of the glacially slow adjustment speeds obtained in linear models there is one aspect of the empirical work that is worthy of further attention a second way of explaining the rogoff puzzle raised by rogoff himself 3 is to relax the assumption that the equilibrium real exchange rate is a constant see e g canzoneri cumby and diba 1996 and chinn and johnston 1996 theoretical models such as that of balassa 1964 and samuelson 1964 imply a nonconstant equilibrium in the real exchange rate if real productivity growth rates differ between countries 4 nonlinear models that incorporate proxies for these effects are found to parsimoniously fit post bretton woods data for the main real exchange rates see venetis paya and peel 2002 and paya venetis and peel 2003 naturally models that ignore this effect may generate misleading speeds of ppp adjustment to shocks in this regard the empirical results of hegwood and papell 2002 for the gold standard period are particularly interesting

oil and gas markets in the uk evidence from a cointegrating approach the paper examines the relationship between uk wholesale gas prices and the brent oil price over the period 1996 2003 in order to investigate whether oil and gas prices decoupled during this period as orthodox gas market liberalisation theory suggests tests for unit roots and cointegration are carried out and it is discovered that a long run equilibrium relationship between uk gas and oil prices exists moreover this relationship pre dates the opening of the uk mainland europe interconnector following a recursive methodology hansen h and johansen s 1999 some tests for parameter constancy in cointegrated var models econometrics journal 2 306 333 it was found that the cointegrating relationship is present throughout the sample period however the long run solutions seem to be more volatile evidence is provided that the short run relationship is linear and impulse response functions are used to examine the effects that a shock in oil would have on gas these findings do not support the assumption that gas prices and oil prices decouple

long run purchasing power parity with asymmetric adjustment 1 introduction despite its intuitive appeal there is inconclusive evidence supporting purchasing power parity ppp between countries with low inflation rates during the post bretton woods period for example enders 1988 taylor 1988 and macdonald 1993 use various forms of cointegration tests called stage three tests and find that real exchange rates exhibit large fluctuations with slow rates of decay toward a long run mean froot and rogoff s 1995 literature review presents a consensus estimate that deviations from long run ppp have a half life of about three years this is somewhat disappointing since stage three tests seem to be well suited to the task they require no assumptions concerning exogeneity and they imply a sensible dynamic relationship among price levels and the exchange rate the vast literature on ppp is indicative of the importance of the issue and the ambiguity of the findings it is well recognized that standard cointegration tests have low power to reject the null hypothesis of no cointegration this observation is especially relevant for ppp since any mean reversion in real rates is very gradual and the length of the post bretton woods period sample period is relatively short efforts to increase the power of unit root and stage three tests have had mixed success for example lothian and taylor 1996 and mark 1990 have tried to circumvent the low power of stage three tests by using long spans of time series data unfortunately the use of long time spans raises the possibility of structural changes occurring during the period being examined panel unit root tests are generally more supportive of ppp than are bilateral tests of real exchange rate behavior for example oh 1996 wei and parsley 1995 and wu 1996 have used panel data in order to enhance the power of standard unit root tests although these particular articles are supportive of ppp panel studies must deal with the thorny issues of cross sectional correlation and the choice of the nations to include in the panel papell 1997 finds that allowing for serial correlation substantially weakens the evidence in favor of long run ppp o connell 1998 applies generalized least squares to panel data to eliminate any contemporaneous correlation in the error structure and finds no evidence supporting ppp the second problem with the standard unit root and cointegration tests is that they implicitly assume symmetric adjustment however official intervention in the foreign exchange market means that nominal exchange rate adjustment may be asymmetric under a managed float for example one of the monetary authorities might be more willing to tolerate currency appreciation than depreciation similarly a currency band mitigates exchange rate movements until the level of the band is altered furthermore the slow adjustment of real exchange rates is often explained by the stickiness of national price levels for example in the well known dornbusch 1976 overshooting model prices and the exchange rate move in the same proportion as the money supply in the very long run however in the short run prices are sticky and monetary shocks cause ppp deviations since the exchange rate moves proportionately more than prices rhee and rich 1995 and madsen and yang 1998 provide empirical evidence corroborating the implications of the asymmetric price adjustment models the key point to note is that if prices are primarily sticky in the downward direction there is no reason to presuppose that real exchange rate adjustment is symmetric in spite of the evidence supportive of asymmetric exchange rate and price adjustments there are only a few nonlinear tests of ppp although they do not explicitly test for ppp michael nobay and peel 1997 and taylor and sarno 1998 estimate real exchange rates as smooth transition threshold adjustment processes enders and falk 1998 formally apply various nonlinear unit root tests to real exchange rates and find little evidence of ppp

target zones and exchange rate dynamics this paper develops a simple model of exchange rate behavior under a target zone regime it shows that the expectation that monetary policy will be adjusted to limit exchange rate variation affects exchange rate behavior even when the exchange rate lies inside the zone and is thus not being defended actively somewhat surprisingly the analysis of target zones turns out to have a strong formal similarity to problems in option pricing and investment under uncertainty

an assessment of proposed energy resource tax reform in russia a static general equilibrium analysis abstract a large part of government revenues in russia comes from royalties and export taxes on crude oil oil products and gas recently the russian government has considered reducing export taxes on crude oil and oil products compensated by an increase in the royalty on crude oil the objective of the paper is to analyse the economy wide effects of this proposal moreover a hypothetical replacement of export taxes and royalties with a pure rent tax is analysed a static single country multi sector computable generation equilibrium cge model is employed the primary findings are as follows a replacement of export taxes on crude oil and oil products with a royalty on crude oil provides substantial allocative efficiency gains but this policy is not a superior one welfare could be substantially improved when the export taxes and royalty are replaced with a pure rent tax that can be implemented in the form of a cash flow tax on the negative side reducing export taxes on crude oil and oil products results in a strong appreciation of the currency as a result domestic producers become less competitive in domestic markets and there is a massive increase in import demand

should russia increase domestic prices for natural gas previous analyses of russia s dual pricing system and hidden subsidies for natural gas have neglected to assess the dual pricing system as a domestic environmental policy if dual pricing is considered as a policy to reduce conventional air pollutants it is more than economically justified in russia on the basis of avoided health risks in the short term the substitution of coal for natural gas may result in significant additional human health risk which translates into economic damage an alternative abatement possibility is expensive and unlikely enforceable due to weak environmental regulation the authors conclude that while the price differential can be expected to diminish over time as russia increasingly moves to a market economy in the near term dual pricing of natural gas remains the most efficient environmental policy for russia

post soviet gas sector restructuring in the cis a political economy approach this paper analyses progress and obstacles to gas sector reform in the most important cis countries russia turkmenistan ukraine uzbekistan taking a political economy perspective this reform process is embedded in a very specific post soviet institutional framework stemming from the legacy of socialism firstly we review the evolution of the gas sector for the period 1992 1998 the paper then identifies the post soviet specifics of gas sector restructuring to which any reform strategy and technical assistance have to be adapted we derive concrete process oriented policy conclusions to accelerate the reform process in a market oriented way the paper concludes with an evaluation of the perspectives of gas sector restructuring in this geopolitically strategic area of the world

purchasing power parity for developing and developed countries what can we learn from non stationary panel data models the aim of this paper is to apply recently developed panel cointegration techniques proposed by pedroni 1999 2004 and generalized by banerjee and carrion i silvestre 2006 to examine the robustness of the ppp concept for a sample of 80 developed and developing countries we find that strong ppp is verified for oecd countries and weak ppp for mena countries however in african asian latin american and central and eastern european countries ppp does not seem relevant to characterize the long run behavior of the real exchange rate further investigations indicate that the nature of the exchange rate regime doesn t condition the validity of ppp which is more easily accepted in countries with high than low inflation

purchasing power parity and country characteristics evidence from panel data tests abstract we examine long run purchasing power parity ppp using panel data methods to test for unit roots in us dollar real exchange rates of 84 countries we find stronger evidence of ppp in countries more open to trade closer to the united states with lower inflation and moderate nominal exchange rate volatility and with similar economic growth rates as the united states we also show that ppp holds for panels of european and latin american countries but not for african and asian countries our findings demonstrate that country characteristics can help explain both adherence to and deviations from long run ppp

real exchange rate adjustment in european transition countries abstract in single equation tests real exchange rates show mean reversion for nine of 10 central and eastern european transition countries for the period january 1993 to december 2005 because of the shift from controlled to market economies and accompanying crises failed policy regimes and changes in exchange rate regimes unit root tests for transition countries often require allowance for structural changes accounting for structural breaks gives substantially faster mean reversion speeds than those found for major industrialized countries these fast adjustment speeds are plausible transition countries had perhaps 10 years to make unprecedented adjustments required for accession to the european union a number of papers have applied non linear models to the central and eastern european countries this paper investigates four non linear models and compares them with piece wise linear break models the break models appear superior in detecting mean reversion for the central and eastern european transition countries

purchasing power parity in less developed and transition economies a review paper abstract the concept of purchasing power parity ppp has been the subject of numerous studies many of which have been unable to prove conclusively this core principle of international finance although industrialized countries have received most of the attention studies that focus on less developed and transition economies have also attained mixed results this study surveys trends in this branch of the literature highlighting the econometric advances that have sought to solve this puzzle while pointing out that more needs to be done to address the reasons that might cause ppp not to hold

european natural gas market forces will bring about competition in any case the purpose is to analyze the emergent commercial forces that promote increasing competition in the european natural gas market the paper begins by describing the traditional market organization along with its monopolistic elements and inflexibilities it goes on to illuminate the destabilizing frustration among producers with fast growing supply potential caused by the limited growth in demand under prevailing market arrangements two emergent commercial forces promoting competition are then dealt with the first is the increasingly widespread effort by large consumers to procure gas on improved terms by circumventing the national transmission companies the important role played by wingas in this respect is reviewed in detail the second is the impending impact of the interconnector a gas pipe between the uk and the continent which becomes operational during 1998 the paper argues that these commercial developments are undermining existing monopolies and will bring about increasing competition even if the formal regulatory regime stays intact

an assessment of optimal gas pricing in russia a cge approach domestic gas prices in russia are administratively regulated and they are substantially lower than export netback prices the administrative price regulation operates as an implicit subsidy on domestic gas consumption the russian government aims to liberalise domestic wholesale gas prices in the long term while the export netback parity is defined as a political objective it seems not to be a necessary target anymore the export netback parity is not economically rational for russia because the average export netback price of gas is higher than the marginal cost due to gazprom s market power in export gas markets an optimal domestic gas price is still not well defined this paper addresses this question by employing a comparative static single country multi sector computable generation equilibrium model cge the administrative regulation of domestic gas prices is explicitly modelled the main findings are as follows an increase in the domestic gas price provides economic efficiency gains the more elastic the export and domestic demand for gas the larger the welfare gains the optimal domestic gas price should be approximately 55 of the export netback price increasing the domestic gas price provides additional government revenues which can be used to reduce distortionary taxes on sectoral effects the structure of the russian economy shifts from energy toward non energy intensive sectors in response to an increase in the domestic gas price there is an increase in the export supply of gas furthermore an increase in the domestic gas price leads to a reduction in total co2 emissions

rent seeking and international commodity agreements the case of coffee although quotas are known to create opportunities for rent seeking such effects have not been examined in the context of international commodity agreements we hypothesize that export quotas imposed by the international coffee agreement ica by creating quota rents in coffee exporting countries encourage directly unproductive dup behavior by domestic groups seeking to capture such rents such behavior can cause substantial economic waste and undesirably alter income distribution the allocational and distributional effects of even moderate rent seeking behavior could be sufficient to transform a coffee exporting country s expected welfare gain from ica quotas into a welfare loss an understanding of these effects and a measure of their magnitude is crucial to any evaluation of the ica the classic analyses of international commodity agreements have focused on how such agreements affect the commodity terms of trade and export revenue instability 2 surprisingly little work exists on the welfare effects of commodity agreements within exporting countries particularly on the income distribution effects or dup activity the agreements might engender 3 the papers by g mcmahon and h dick and colleagues are partial exceptions 4 mcmahon shows that kenya s response to ica quotas the government banned new coffee plantings in an effort to control output was inefficient and had regressive income effects dick and colleagues compare the effects of buffer stocks and export quotas on a domestic economy using a general equilibrium model and find that quotas are better because they shift resources from

the choice of numeraire currency in panel tests of purchasing power parity we investigate the implications of the choice of numeraire currency on panel tests of purchasing power parity under the current regime of flexible exchange rates by conducting panel unit root tests with twenty one different base currencies we show that the conditions necessary for numeraire irrelevancy are not supported empirically and that the choice of numeraire currency can and does matter for ppp the evidence of ppp is stronger for european than for non european base currencies distance between the countries and volatility of the exchange rates are the most important determinants of the results

economy wide effects of international and russia s climate policies abstract the objectives of this paper are to analyse the economy wide effects of international climate policy on the russian economy as well as the effects of russia s climate policy on european economies our analysis is based on a general equilibrium model that includes inertias such as imperfect sectoral labour mobility and vintage capital and has a detailed depiction of the power generation sector we found that international climate policy could reduce russia s private welfare by 1 8 annually due to lower revenues from exports of fossil fuels at the sectoral level russia could gain a comparative advantage in producing energy intensive commodities and hence russia s producers of those commodities increase their production and export supplies this could result in a carbon leakage in russia eliminating implicit subsidies on domestic consumption of gas and petroleum products could reduce russia s private welfare loss by 0 6 points and eliminate the carbon leakage nevertheless eliminating implicit subsidies on gas and petroleum products might not be sufficient to achieve the pledged emission reductions by 2030 moreover this leads to an undesirable increase in coal consumption and therefore some additional climate policy such as a carbon tax or an emission trading system might be required we also found that russia s climate policy could have positive but moderate effects on the european economies in particular countries such as lithuania slovakia and hungary benefit due to decreased export prices for gas crude oil and petroleum products from russia

on cross country differences in the persistence of real exchange rates abstract previous findings of long run purchasing power parity come mainly from data for industrial countries raising the issue of whether the results suffer sample selection bias and exaggerate the general relevance of parity reversion this study uncovers substantial cross country heterogeneity in the persistence of deviations from parity the results show that it is more likely rather than less likely to find parity reversion for developing countries than industrial countries although some persistence variations may partly reflect country differences in structural characteristics such as inflation experience and government spending a considerable portion of those variations seems unaccounted for

the impact of the international coffee agreement on producing countries the main objective of this article is to analyze the impact of the international coffee agreement s export system on the world coffee market focusing on increases in real export revenues transfer benefits and reductions in income variability risk benefits in each exporting country over the recent period of operation of the international coffee agreement s export quota system the authors find that the quota system had a stabilizing effect on world coffee prices the quotas reduced real export revenues for most small exporting countries but large producers gained most small countries gained however in terms of risk reduction if a brief suspension of the quota occurs from time to time caused for example by adverse weather which results in a shortfall in world supply the quota system works like a buffer stock scheme on average producing countries as a whole lose transfer benefits but gain risk benefits

purchasing power parity in developing countries multi period evidence under the current float abstract using panel unit root tests we examine purchasing power parity ppp for us dollar real exchange rates of developing countries during the current floating rate period since evidence of ppp may vary from period to period we examine the data for moving 10 year periods from 1976 85 up to 1990 99 we organize panels based on country characteristics influencing the validity of ppp those characteristics include openness inflation and the level and growth rate of per capita gdp although we find stronger evidence of ppp after 1980 our examination of panel data over 15 10 year periods yields only limited support for ppp

when is a break up of gazprom good for russia in the late 1990s several proposals for a structural reform that would bring competition and market prices to the russian gas industry were intensely debated splitting up russian gas monopolist gazprom into several producing companies was a considered option in this paper i examine theoretically and numerically how a split up of gazprom would affect russian national welfare results show that under the current gas market structures in europe and russia the split up of gazprom s monopoly might not be beneficial for russia however analysis in the paper indicates that the market shares that gazprom has in both russian domestic and european gas markets are important in determining whether gazprom s dominance is supported under the national welfare criteria when gazprom has small market share in europe and large market share in russia a break up of gazprom might plausibly result in increase of russian national welfare

the merits of dual pricing of russian natural gas our analysis reveals that from russia s perspective there is no economic rationale to unify the price of natural gas it sells domestically and in europe we argue that pipelines allow gazprom to segment the russian market from the european including turkey market and that russia has market power in the european market if russia were to fail to exploit this market power in its european market by selling its natural gas to europe at only full long run marginal cost plus transportation costs russia would lose between 5 billion and 7 5 billion per year almost two per cent of its gdp if instead russia were to raise its domestic prices to the prices it charges in europe russian industry would incur very large investment adjustment and unemployment costs in the short run adjustment costs that cannot be justified on the basis of comparative advantage we estimate that the efficient world price would be achieved if gazprom were to employ its optimal two part tariff the optimal two part tariff would double gazprom s annual profits in europe but it involves significant long term risks for gazprom of lost market share

do real exchange rates follow a nonlinear mean reverting process in developing countries in an effort to fight relatively high inflation many developing countries try to manage their nominal exchange rates through official intervention in addition developing countries tend to have high transportation costs tariffs and nontariff barriers these factors are among the sources of generating nonlinearity in real exchange rates and hence some nonlinear adjustment toward purchasing power parity ppp in developing countries in this paper we employ monthly real effective exchange rate reer data of 88 developing countries and test the null of nonstationarity versus an alternative of linear stationarity by the means of a conventional unit root test and compare the results with those obtained from a new test in which the null is the same but the alternative hypothesis is nonlinear stationarity the latter test supports the ppp theory in more developing countries compared with the former test suggesting that nonlinear adjustment toward ppp in developing countries is an important phenomenon reported country characterizations indicate that reversion in reer occurs more often for high inflation countries and for countries with high flexibility in their exchange rates

the welfare implications of brazil s coffee export price subsidies during the ica to increase coffee export revenues during the international coffee agreement brazil provided selected purchasers with export rebates that could be used to pay for future coffee purchases this subsidy mutated and grew over time encouraged by rent seeking the subsidy had huge cost to the brazilian treasury 9 8 billion in constant 1982 us dollars or about 13 of coffee export revenues as exports were usually quota constrained the subsidy increased brazil s international coffee price particularly during 1980 1986 absolutely and relative to its competitors prices the unexpected variation in brazil s price also caused the new york coffee sugar and cocoa exchange to terminate trading in brazilian coffee futures making it more costly to hedge brazilian coffee until today the econometric evidence is mixed but it seems likely the subsidy reduced brazil s net economic welfare and redistributed income from the treasury to foreign roasters domestic exporters and government bureaucrats

russian gas price reform and the eu russia gas relationship incentives consequences and european security of supply in order to provide a comprehensive picture on the relationship between russia and the eu the focus should be on both the external energy relationship as well as russia s internal organization this paper sets out to do this by combining both strands of research in order to arrive at recommendations for europe on the way to adjust its energy policy towards russia the emphasis is on whether or not russia should impose unified gas pricing main conclusions are that the perceived advantages of unified russian gas pricing to russia as well as europe are in fact overstated and that eu security of supply might worsen under unified gas prices three policy recommendations are that eu policy should 1 more explicitly acknowledge the interdependence between russia and europe 2 not push russia towards unified gas pricing and 3 not take for granted any increase in russian exports flowing to europe

review of key international demand elasticities for major industrializing economies abstract this paper conducts a selective review of various estimates for energy demand responses focused specially upon lower income industrializing economies rather than richer mature nations it emphasizes recent trends from empirical studies that have been published after 2000 emphasis is placed on the five major emerging or transitional economies in brazil china india mexico and russia although other important nations like chile and south korea are also discussed when studies are available the review focuses attention on the long run responses to changes in prices and income after capital stock turnover has been completed the terminology often refers to elasticities or the percentage change in energy use divided by the percentage change in price or income holding constant all other factors that could influence energy use decisions estimates cover petroleum products natural gas and electricity although the available studies often ignore coal they also include the economy wide impacts real gdp to price changes most studies have focused upon household and transportation use of liquid fuels many fewer studies have investigated fuels used by industry or commerce or for electric generation based upon the available estimates price and income elasticities for liquid fuels are generally less than one unity for many countries and sectors except for the long run income effect for transportation purposes which can range widely by country between 0 24 and 1 75 while averaging 0 94 for all countries

validity of purchasing power parity for selected latin american countries linear and non linear unit root tests abstract the aim of this study is to examine empirically the validity of ppp in the context of unit root tests based on linear and non linear models of the real effective exchange rate of argentina brazil chile colombia mexico peru and venezuela for this purpose we apply the harvey et al 2008 linearity test and the non linear unit root test kruse 2011 the results show that the series with linear characteristics are argentina brazil chile colombia and peru and those with non linear characteristics are mexico and venezuela the linear unit root tests indicate that the real effective exchange rate is stationary for chile and peru and the non linear unit root tests evidence that mexico is stationary in the period analyzed the results show support for the validity of ppp in only three of the seven countries

interpreting real exchange rate movements in transition countries abstract real exchange rate movements in the transition economies during the initial transition period were unusually large by the standards of other economies and periods using cross sectional evidence this paper documents how real exchange rates were generally misaligned at the onset of the transition and how most of this misalignment was eliminated over a relatively short period turning to the time series dimension the paper shows that estimates from a consensus type single equation model of the real exchange rate are well behaved and provide a good fit for exchange rate movements in the early transition period the results highlight the role of productivity driven real exchange rate movements that can be interpreted as reflecting both the impact of the structural transformation process on productivity in the tradables sector per se and the effects of changes in tradables versus non tradables productivity furthermore the results show that the relationship between productivity and real exchange rates holds both when productivity is increasing and when it is falling

international commodity agreements an obituary notice abstract it is widely believed that international commodity agreements have lapsed because they have failed the reality is more complex the tin agreement did collapse but for sugar and cocoa adverse market conditions and lack of general support made stabilization impractical control of the coffee market ceased largely because of disagreements both between and within the producing countries on the division of the benefits resulting from higher prices overall commodity control fits uneasily in an increasingly globalized and competitive world and this perception has resulted in a diminished willingness to resolve the practical difficulties of price stabilization

the welfare effects of targeted export subsidies a general equilibrium approach a three country model of export subsidies is developed with an exporter an importer and a neutral country which can act on either side of the market when the neutral country is an exporter the country offering a targeted export subsidy always suffers a welfare loss however when the neutral country is an importer the possibility of a paradoxical result that the subsidizing country can gain and the subsidized country can lose is shown to exist and the conditions under which this result occurs are derived the model fails to provide justification on national welfare grounds for widespread use of targeted export subsidies such as the export enhancement program

russian gas exchange a new indicator of market efficiency and competition or the instrument of monopolist abstract russian government sanctioned the first gas trade at the saint petersburg international mercantile exchange spimex in 2012 as a part of the gas industry national strategy federal antimonopoly service fas proposed a reform aimed to boost competition among producers and to increase consumer welfare the proposal included lifting of price floor regulation for gazprom that supposed to be a vital element of transition from the government price regulation to spimex benchmark for over the counter otc segment structural reform of this scale has never happened in russia furthermore there are only descriptive studies in the existing literature this paper aims to fill this gap by testing market efficiency in spimex based on fama s theory with the well established model we test the consistency of gas futures and spot prices for unbiasedness we imply this methodology because in transition to exchange benchmark it is necessary that price is formed under market forces and is not influenced by players who have market power or dominance to make a reasonable conclusion we supplement the simulation by relevant qualitative analysis of liquidity price differentials between contracts and market concentration in the exchange the goal of the paper is to answer whether the exchange price today can be a benchmark and substitute for the state regulated price combined with qualitative analysis we argue that the scheduled deregulation counterintuitively may improve the dominance of gazprom in the domestic market

a strategic model of european gas supply gasmod abstract this paper presents a model of the european natural gas supply gasmod which is structured as a two stage game of successive natural gas exports to europe upstream market and wholesale trade within europe downstream market and which explicitly includes infrastructure capacities we compare three possible market scenarios cournot competition in both markets perfect competition in both markets and perfect competition in the downstream with cournot competition in the upstream market eu liberalization we find that cournot competition in both markets is the most accurate representation of today s european natural gas market where suppliers at both stages generate a mark up at the expense of the final customer double marginalization our results yield a diversified supply portfolio with newly emerging lng exporters gaining market shares enforcing competition in the european downstream market would lead to lower prices and higher quantities by avoiding the welfare reducing effects of double marginalization binding infrastructure capacity restrictions strongly influence the results and we identify bottlenecks mainly for intra european trade relations whereas transport capacity in the upstream market is globally sufficient in the cournot scenario

carbon taxation and market structure a cge analysis for russia abstract russia is one of the world s major sources of carbon based energy as well as one its most intensive users introducing carbon taxes can lead to a reduction in emissions and encourage investment in energy efficiency we investigate the economic effects of carbon taxes on the russian economy under perfect competition and a cournot oligopoly in output markets the main findings are i substituting carbon taxes for labour taxes can yield a strong double dividend in russia however welfare gains strongly depend on the labour supply elasticity and elasticities of substitution between capital labour and energy ii under the assumption of a cournot oligopoly with homogenous products and symmetric firms in the markets for natural gas petroleum and chemical products metals and minerals welfare costs of the environmental tax reform can be higher than under perfect competition this is because introducing carbon taxes leads to a reduction in already sub optimal output thereby exacerbating pre existing distortions arising from imperfect competition iii furthermore increases in energy costs can result in higher mark ups in some markets because of less competition resulting from firms exit

gazprom vs other russian gas producers the evolution of the russian gas sector abstract the non gazprom gas producers ngps doubled their share of the russian domestic gas market between 2000 and 2010 and have continued growing since then for several years especially novatek expanded more recently rosneft has emerged as a key player not least through its purchase of tnk bp this article begins with an overview of the companies in the russian gas sector their resource bases and capacities and subsequently examines whether differences in field development costs and export market access may make it rational for gazprom to continue ceding market share to the ngps with rising costs of gazprom s queue of greenfield developments any delays in gazprom s investment program may be compensated through increased ngp production the article argues that the ngps are ready to fill the gap may be allowed to do so and are already increasing their market share in an increasingly competitive market the stage may now be set for a continued gradual transformation of the russian gas market in which the interests of gazprom and the ngps may be complementary or may be pitted against each other but those of the russian federation are in any case likely to be better fulfilled than in the past

purchasing power parity over two centuries strengthening the case for real exchange rate stability a reply to cuddington and liang cuddington and liang 2000 purchasing power parity over two centuries journal of international money and finance 19 751 755 examine the long span of sterling dollar real exchange rate data of lothian and taylor 1996 real exchange rate behavior the recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries journal of political economy 104 488 509 and claim to reject long run purchasing power parity by fitting time trends or by considering very high order autoregresssive representations this reply demonstrates however that the central claims of lothian and taylor are in fact strengthened by the implications of cuddington and liang s analysis in that while the economic importance of introducing trend terms is slight this leads to a faster estimated speed of mean reversion c 2000 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved jel classification f31 f41 c22

a natural monopoly in natural gas transmission abstract in this article we test for subadditivity in the cost structure associated with transporting natural gas by trans canada pipelines ltd and measure for possible cost savings from increased competition that could be realized by removing the monopoly status granted by the national energy board in measuring subadditivity we apply both the baumol et al contestable markets and the theory of industry structure 1982 and the evans and heckman am econ rev 764 1984 613 procedures our results show evidence of subadditivity in the cost structure and consequently the possible benefits from increased competition resulting from splitting up the monopoly could be offset by the sacrifice of scale efficiencies

the gas deregulation process in europe economic and political approach this paper analyses the efforts to deregulate the market to remove the monopolies and introduce competition both at the european union level european commission and national levels the first part of the paper describes the present situation with an emphasis on the institutional disparities among the european countries it presents the outlines of the gas directive recently adopted by the european commission the second part analyzes the perspectives of such deregulation for europe particular attention is given to the strategies implemented by the oil companies on the market the third part of the paper insists on the pending questions the transposition of the gas directive into the national laws of the european countries gives rise to several questions which have yet to be answered

an ex post welfare analysis of natural gas regulation in the industrial sector the current structure of the us natural gas industry is a result of the evolution of regulatory policy over the past three decades which began with the deregulation of natural gas prices at the wellhead ngpa of 1978 and culminated with the deregulation of interstate transportation of natural gas ferc order 636 focusing on the industrial sector this paper estimates the welfare and price effects associated with the changes in regulatory policy overtime actual prices converge towards estimated equilibrium prices consequently deadweight losses diminished an estimated 15 47 billion 2003 dollars of welfare loss had been incurred from 1977 to 2000

real exchange rates in small open oecd and transition economies comparing apples with oranges abstract we find that productivity gains in tradables cause an appreciation of the real exchange rate via both tradable and nontradable prices in the cee 5 and have no affect in the baltic countries while they lead to a depreciation of the real exchange rate of tradables in oecd economies that overcompensates the appreciation due to nontradable prices rising net foreign liabilities lead to a real appreciation in the baltic countries instead of the expected depreciation found in oecd and cee 5 countries these differences are due to the different impact of the fundamentals on the real exchange rate depending on the time horizon studied

today or not today deregulating the russian gas sector abstract although russia is the world s biggest producer of natural gas its ability to maintain timely and reliable supply to meet the growing global demand has come under question in recent months the gas war with ukraine notwithstanding concern has been raised by a number of observers that underinvestment in the gas sector will lead to a systemic failure of the state monopolist oao gazprom to increase or even maintain current levels of production yet with a quarter of european gas coming from russia and with increasing presence of gazprom in european downstream operations such as germany hungary and other cis states as well as seemingly closer ties with algeria another major supplier of gas to europe there has been a strong reaction from europe s policy makers to decrease dependence on russian gas deregulating and liberalising the gas sector would see the lifting of restrictions to foreign or independent investors wishing to gain access to russian reserves as well as the unhindered access to the pipeline infrastructure and export markets it would also signal the unbundling of gazprom and an end to the artificially low price of gas to the domestic consumer this paper discusses whether deregulation is the optimal way to raise capital attract investment and increase supply security for russia s western neighbours in doing so the paper identifies the objectives of the eu as the importer whilst trying to align them with the objectives of the russian federation as the exporter in the current political context

real exchange rate behavior in the middle east a re examination abstract this letter extends recent work by bahmani oskooee bahmani oskooee m do exchange rates follow a random walk process in middle eastern countries economics letters 1998 58 339 344 on testing long run purchasing power parity for middle eastern countries during the post bretton woods period using multivariate nonlinear models strong support is provided for highly nonlinear reversion of real exchange rates toward a stable equilibrium for each country examined

russian natural gas exports will russian gas price reforms improve the european security of supply in this paper we use both theoretical and numerical tools to study potential effects on russian gas exports from different russian domestic gas prices and production capacities in 2015 we also investigate whether a fully competitive european gas market may provide incentives for gazprom the dominant russian gas company to change its export behaviour our main findings suggest that both increased domestic gas prices and sufficient production capacities are vital to maintain gazprom s market share in europe over the next decade in fact russia may struggle to carry out its current long term export commitments if domestic prices are sufficiently low at the same time if russian prices approach european net back levels gazprom may reduce exports in favour of a relatively more profitable domestic market

is the gas supply market a natural monopoly econometric evidence from the british gas regions we have estimated a multi output model of marketing and customer accounting costs in the bg regions the cost function is well behaved separable exhibits unitary elasticities of substitution between factor inputs and there are constant returns to scale when both outputs rise by the same proportion when one output is held fixed economies of scale can be exploited by expanding the other output if our model is representative of the global cost function this suggests that suppliers who already have a large market share in the non domestic market will have a competitive advantage when the domestic market is liberalised in 1998

the purchasing power parity debate originally propounded by the 16th century scholars of the university of salamanca the concept of purchasing power parity ppp was revived in the interwar period in the context of the debate concerning the appropriate level at which to re establish international exchange rate parities broadly accepted as a long run equilibrium condition in the post war period it first was advocated as a short run equilibrium by many international economists in the first few years following the breakdown of the bretton woods system in the early 1970s and then increasingly came under attack on both theoretical and empirical grounds from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s accordingly over the last three decades a large literature has built up that examines how much the data deviated from theory and the fruits of this research have provided a deeper understanding of how well ppp applies in both the short run and the long run since the mid 1990s larger datasets and nonlinear econometric methods in particular have improved estimation as deviations narrowed between real exchange rates and ppp so did the gap narrow between theory and data and some degree of confidence in long run ppp began to emerge again in this respect the idea of long run ppp now enjoys perhaps its strongest support in more than 30 years a distinct reversion in economic thought

the rise and decline of rent seeking activity in the brazilian coffee sector lessons from the imposition and removal of coffee export quotas summary brazil the world s largest coffee exporter encouraged efforts in the 1960s to form the international coffee agreement ica which restricted total coffee exports via country export quotas the quotas led to significant domestic quota rents in producing countries this paper analyzes the effects of rent seeking in brazil the brazilian institute of coffee ibc which was responsible for coffee policy was the focus of rent seeking the paper models the policy instruments used by the ibc shows how rent seeking affected policy industry efficiency and the distribution of rents explains the causes and effects of ibc reforms in the late 1980s and draws lessons from the experience

transactions costs and nonlinear adjustment in real exchange rates an empirical investigation eolquilibrium models of real exchange rate determination in the presence of transactions costs imply a nonlinear adjustment process toward purchasing power parity ppp conventional cointegration tests which ignore the effect of transactions costs may be biased against the long run ppp hypothesis our results using both monthly data for the interwar period and annual data spanning two centuries clearly reject the linear framework in favor of an exponential smooth transition autoregressive process the systematic pattern in the estimates of the nonlinear models provides strong evidence of mean reverting behavior for ppp deviations and helps explain the mixed results of previous studies

on the impacts of carbon tax and technological progress on china using a dynamic national computable general equilibrium model we investigate the impact of carbon tax and energy efficiency improvement on the economy and environment of china the chinese social

international commodity agreements design and performance abstract this article traces the design and performance of the five currently or recently active international commodity agreements icas in cocoa coffee natural rubber sugar and tin following detailed discussion of each of these the author makes three observations that icas can only be successful provided that they command a consensus in their industries that existing agreements are not robust enough with regard to exchange rates and that existing agreements are poorly drafted the author argues that the collapse of the tin agreement in october 1985 may have marked the end of the postwar chapter in the commodity intervention story he finds it improbable that new icas will emerge and suggests instead that more of the existing agreements will lapse

purchasing power parity under the gold standard 1 introduction long run purchasing power parity lrppp a mainstay of international economic theory has proved difficult to back up empirically many attempts have been made using various time series of data yet results continue to be mixed a standout exception to these mixed results is presented by diebold husted and rush 1991 whose work has been interpreted as very strong evidence of lrppp because of their across the board rejection of the unit root for a large sample of real exchange rates baillie 1996 p 51 cites diebold husted and rush as reestablishing purchasing power parity as a meaningful long run concept despite the substantial mixed results of other studies these mixed results are usually attributed to the power problems associated with standard unit root tests especially for small samples diebold husted and rush 1991 overcome these shortcomings by loosening the structure of the model to allow a longmemory process diebold husted and rush 1991 model real exchange rate behavior using autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average arfima models in doing so they reject the unit root for 16 real exchange rates from the gold standard era in favor of a fractionally integrated alternative hypothesis a long memory process is essentially a stationary one but where the autocorrelations take far longer to decay than the exponential rate associated with the autoregressive moving average arma class baillie 1996 p 6 this observation implies that purchasing power parity ppp holds but in some cases only in the extreme long run we agree with diebold husted and rush 1991 that the structure of standard unit root tests is overly restrictive however we offer a different solution to this problem from standard unit root tests one must conclude that either all deviations from ppp are permanent or all deviations dissipate over time however there is a third possibility that has both theoretical and empirical support unit root tests do not allow the possibility that while most deviations dissipate a few remain as permanent shocks real exchange rates may show substantial mean reversion but to a changing mean rather than to the constant ppp value this idea which we call quasi purchasing power parity qppp draws support from the balassasamuelson theory which asserts that productivity shocks can have permanent effects on real exchange rates samuelson 1994 p 202 criticizes economists who tried to use ppp as a guide even when substantive microeconomic changes had taken place between the previous putative equilibrium period and the new status quo he cites an example from the 1980s when the actual yen dollar exchange rate was 150 yen per dollar according to ppp the equilibrium exchange rate was 200 yen per dollar yet the rate proceeded to drop to 110 yen per dollar and below in qppp terms this situation would represent not a lack of mean reversion but evidence of an equilibrium that had shifted away from ppp this is a form of the penn effect whereby a rich country in comparison with a poor one will be estimated to be richer than it really is if you pretend that the simplified cassel version of purchasing power parity is correct samuelson 1994 p 201 we assert that this penn effect can occur not just between rich and poor countries but between any two countries if one of these countries is affected by a permanent external shock qppp also supports engel s 1996 p 1 proposition that the real exchange rate evolves as the sum of two processes a stationary but persistent component and a non stationary component it is generally held that while the exchange rate deviates from its long run equilibrium value in the short run it eventually converges to that equilibrium value in the long run the question then is what is that long run equilibrium value some argue it is the ppp level while others argue that there is a complex set of factors determining the long run value including such things as the relative labor productivities at home and abroad engel 1996 p

equilibrium exchange rates in transition economies taking stock of the issues in this paper we present an overview of a number of issues relating to the equilibrium exchange rates of transition economies of the former soviet bloc in particular we present a critical overview of the various methods available for calculating equilibrium exchange rates and discuss how useful they are likely to be for the transition economies amongst our findings is the result that the trend appreciation usually observed for the exchange rates of these economies is affected by factors other than the usual balassa samuelson effect such as the behaviour of the real exchange rate of the open sector and regulated prices we then consider three main sources of uncertainty relating to the implementation of an equilibrium exchange rate model namely differences in the theoretical underpinnings differences in the econometric estimation techniques and differences relating to the time series and cross sectional dimensions of the data the ensuing three dimensional space of real misalignments is probably a useful tool in determining the direction of a possible misalignment rather than its precise size copyright blackwell publishers ltd 2006

distributional effects of higher natural gas prices in russia abstract this paper analyses the distributional effects of eliminating the implicit subsidy on natural gas consumption in russia the analysis is based on a computable general equilibrium model with multiple households and a detailed power generation sector it is found that using additional government revenues from higher domestic gas prices to increase the income of low and middle income households could improve the welfare of these households and alleviate income inequality in russia e g total private consumption of the poorest decile could increase by 3 nevertheless the most efficient revenue recycling policy would be to invest in the energy efficiency of buildings which have the largest energy savings potential in russia in the long term investing in the energy efficiency of buildings could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 240 million tonnes of co2 equivalent per year and increase the welfare of low and middle income households e g total private consumption of the poorest decile increases by 1 it is also found that increasing the regulated domestic gas price could lead to windfall profits for non gazprom producers hence to increase government revenues the gas price reform could be supplemented by an increase in the capital income tax in the gas sector

a century of purchasing power parity confirmed the role of nonlinearity abstract taylor 2002 claims that purchasing power parity ppp has held over the 20th century based on strong evidence of stationary for century long real exchange rates for 20 countries lopez et al 2005 however found much weaker evidence of ppp with alternative lag selection methods we reevaluate taylor s claim by implementing a recently developed nonlinear unit root test by park and shintani 2005 we find strong evidence of nonlinear mean reversion in real exchange rates that confirms taylor s claim we also find a possible misspecification problem in using the estar model that may not be detected with taylor approximation based tests

testing ppp in the non linear star framework abstract we apply the standard adf test and a new test that incorporates non linearity in time series to the real effective exchange rates of 23 industrial countries the new test provides support for ppp in more countries than the adf test