could the proposed wto special safeguard mechanism protect farmers from low international prices abstract this paper offers an empirical analysis of the proposal by some developing countries for an agricultural special safeguard mechanism ssm in the world trade organization it draws on political economy and market theory to demonstrate that the loss averting domestic producer benefits that proponents believe the ssm would offer agricultural importing developing countries may be illusory insofar as agricultural exporting countries also seek to avert producer losses by way of illustration the paper then uses time series data to analyze past government responses to fluctuations in the world s rice markets the results suggest that the proposed ssm would deliver at most only a small fraction of the loss averting benefits that have been advertised by the proponents of the ssm since the analysis applies to upward as well as downward spikes in international prices it underscores the importance of strengthening multilateral disciplines on both import and export trade interventions to reduce beggar thy neighbor unilateral trade policy responses to food price fluctuations

differing house price linkages across uk regions a multi dimensional recursive ripple model the aim of this study is to determine the nature of the relationship between house prices of different types of housing across the uk regions we use an autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach to determine the long run relationships between house prices as well as an error correction model to estimate the short run dynamics between house prices the data include house prices across the regions of great britain and for new old and modern houses the results suggest that house price shocks ripple across regions although the nature of the relationship varies across housing types we further simulate the impact of house price shocks and reveal a complex structure whereby a house price shock in region a impacts upon prices in other regions which in turn feedback into region a in a recursive ripple

potential implications of a special safeguard mechanism in the world trade organization the case of wheat the special safeguard mechanism both quantity and price based was key in the july 2008 failure to reach agreement in the world trade organization wto negotiations under the doha development agenda a stochastic simulation model of the world wheat market is used to investigate the effects of the special safeguard mechanism as expected the quantity based safeguard is found to reduce imports raise domestic prices and boost mean domestic production in the countries that implement it however rather than insulating developing countries in those regions from price volatility the quantity based safeguard increases domestic price volatility largely by restricting imports when domestic output is low and prices are high the quantity based safeguard shrinks average wheat imports nearly 50 percent in some regions and global wheat trade falls by 4 7 percent the price based safeguard discriminates against lower price exporters and contributes to producer price instability

ripple effects in south african house prices this paper analyses the ripple effect of house prices in large medium and small sized houses of five major metropolitan areas of south africa namely cape town durban unicity greater johannesburg port elizabeth uitenhage and pretoria based on available quarterly data covering the period of 1966 q1 to 2010 q1 following the extant literature the issue is contextualised as a unit root problem with one expecting the ratios of metropolitan house price to national house price to exhibit stationarity to an underlying trend value if there is diffusion in house prices using bayesian and non linear unit root tests besides the standard linear tests of stationarity with and without structural break overwhelming support is found for the existence of robust ripple effects also factor analysis conducted suggested that ripple effects originate in cape town for the large housing segment and in durban for the medium and small sized houses

measuring trade strategy in the presence of non tradeables theory and some evidence for the caribbean this article models trade policies in the presence of non tradeables and investigates trade strategy interventions and outcomes where the price of non tradeables endogenously adjusts to trade interventions trade regime bias and neutrality issues are examined within a three sector open economy model the theoretical framework is operationalised using empirical evidence for trinidad and barbados the robustness of partial equilibrium measures of protection for classifying trade strategies is challenged and evidence on alternative general equilibrium or true measures of protection is reported true or revealed trade strategies are shown to differ from those apparently intended by policy makers

regional house price interactions in the uk 1975 81 a cross spectral analysis 1986 regional house price interactions in the uk 1975 81 a cross spectral analysis applied economics vol 18 no 9 pp 1011 1023

the convergence of regional house prices in the uk the ripple effect hypothesis implies a long run convergence of regional uk house prices however despite many authors believing in the existence of such an underlying constancy statistical evidence has yet to be presented supporting this implication in this paper an alternative approach is proposed to analyse regional house price ratios in contrast to the findings of previous studies application of this new procedure results in the detection of widespread convergence of house prices in a number of regions of the uk the results suggest that the failure of previous analyses to uncover convergence is due to an underlying asymmetry in the adjustment process being ignored interestingly the form of asymmetry detected varies between regions while regions in the south east experience faster convergence following downswings in prices other regions exhibit more rapid convergence following increases in prices

size and sign asymmetries in house price adjustments long run mean reversion in real house prices is determined by the relative strength of fundamental factors against the short run influences this article suggests that the adjustment towards the lo

positive feedback trading and diffusion of asset price changes evidence from housing transactions the positive feedback hypothesis states that good news bad news engenders positive negative attitudes that accentuate the impact of the news on asset prices it is a special case of the representativeness heuristic which states that there is a general tendency to overemphasize the most recent evidence this paper tests a form of the positive feedback hypothesis where recent rates of change in asset prices become important information used by decision makers if this is the case housing price changes will tend to diffuse throughout a metropolitan area evidence from hartford connecticut supports this hypothesis and the evidence is inconsistent with alternative explanations

a disaggregated analysis of asymmetrical behaviour in the uk housing market potential asymmetrical adjustment in uk house prices is considered the present analysis extends previous research in a number of crucial ways first a seminal examination of asymmetry in regionally disaggregated uk house prices is undertaken secondly data are examined which are further disaggregated according to the age or vintage of the housing stock however the major development concerns the application of a non parametric testing approach to detect cyclical asymmetry in contrast to previously employed tests in the economics literature the triples test employed possesses high power and is not sensitive to outliers it is found that extensive asymmetry is present in uk house prices with cyclical peaks typically being greater in magnitude than corresponding troughs the implications of these findings for the comparison and construction of economic theories of the housing market the specification of econometric models and the construction and implementation of economic policy are noted

comovement in euro area housing prices a fractional cointegration approach this paper analyses comovement in housing prices across the euro area we use techniques based on the concepts of fractional integration and cointegration our results indicate that all the individual log real price indices display orders of integration which are above one implying long memory in their corresponding growth rates further looking at the cointegration relationships we observe that the series for the euro area is cointegrated with those of belgium germany and france focusing on the individual countries we find cointegration relationships between belgium and spain belgium and the netherlands germany and spain germany and ireland france and spain and ireland and the netherlands other bilateral cointegration relationships can either clearly be rejected or the results are ambiguous finally prices in germany seem to move in the opposite direction from other countries which may be related to capital flows associated with current account imbalances

regional housing price dependency in the uk a dynamic network approach the cross regional dependency in the uk housing market is analysed using regional house price indices in this article a network approach based on partial correlations is proposed along with roll

a new perspective on the ripple effect in the uk housing market comovement cyclical subsamples and alternative indices an alternative perspective is provided on the existence of a ripple effect in the uk housing market in contrast to previous studies the analysis involves consideration of information on the changes in house prices to which the hypothesis of house price diffusion posited by the ripple effect relates rather than their levels in an examination of changes in house prices in london relative to other regions of the uk directional forecasting methods are employed to establish the extent of the relationship between geographical proximity and comovement across the three month window provided by quarterly data consequently the analysis provides a direct examination of the ripple effect which refers to changes in prices rather than the convergence of levels which has become a feature of the empirical literature the literature is extended further by both the application of dating techniques to perform the analysis across cycles and phases of cycles recovery and recessionary periods in the uk housing market

housing markets with endogenous search theory and implications abstract in this model buyers and sellers enter a housing market with imperfect elasticity buyers screen houses for sale in two segments of the market select a set of houses for search in each segment and then control their intensities of costly search among houses in their preferred sets their truncated distributions of acceptable match values are assumed to be power law partial equilibrium is calculated explicitly and steady state is characterized analytically the analysis is extended to multiple segments and markets empirical implications include higher average prices and price rent ratios in preferred segments and markets as well as spatial diffusion across segments and markets of average prices price rent ratios and search the predictions are consistent with existing empirical evidence

agricultural trade distortions during the global financial crisis the authors are grateful for financial support from the australian research council rural industries research and development corporation and world bank

house prices and consumer welfare we develop a new approach to measuring changes in consumer welfare due to changes in the price of owner occupied housing in our approach an agent s welfare adjustment is defined as the transfer required to keep expected discounted utility constant given a change in current house prices we demonstrate that up to a first order approximation there is no aggregate change in welfare due to price increases in the existing housing stock this follows from a simple market clearing condition where capital gains experienced by sellers are exactly offset by welfare losses to buyers we show that this result holds approximately even in a model that accounts for changes in consumption and investment plans prompted by current house price changes there can however be changes in welfare due to additions to the stock of housing or to changes in the price of renovating and upgrading the existing stock of housing for the united states we estimate the welfare cost of house price appreciation to be an average of 127 per household per year over the 1984 1998 period

trade strategy and revealed trade bias an evaluation for a small industrializing economy abstract the traditional classification of trade strategies into import substitution is and export promotion ep is based on the traditional two sector trade model in the context of a three sector model including nontradeables there is potentially greater analytical richness and apparently greater possibility of a wider range of ex ante trade strategies included among these possibilities is a mixed is ep strategy which generates a protradeable bias this paper investigates the properties of a general equilibrium model and the necessary commercial policy interventions required to bring about particular changes in relative prices detailed evidence on revealed trade regime biases within the tradeables good sectors and between tradeables and nontradeables is provided for barbados the evidence indicates that ex post classification of trade strategy may differ significantly from the ex ante or intended strategy and that use of partial equilibrium estimates of effective protection of tradeables alone is likely to be an inappropriate means of classifying trade strategies

price dynamics in biological production processes exposed to environmental shocks this paper demonstrates a mechanism by which environmental shocks in biological production processes can lead to extreme price movements and thus be a contributing factor to short term food price volatility in biological production processes environmental shocks can lead to a stock out when the harvest transitions to a new stock year class with a different marginal value the result in the market is a temporary price spike or bubble bounded by the marginal value of the new stock we highlight this phenomenon in a cohort or year class biological production setting each year class in the model is a finite non renewable capital stock and capital theory is used to solve for the stochastic dynamic competitive equilibrium the model is parameterized to be representative of the norwegian salmon aquaculture industry results suggest that the model can replicate much of the observed patterns in price harvest and capital stock dynamics including the infrequent occurrence of extremely high prices in the market

is there long run convergence among regional house prices in the uk this paper investigates the long run convergence of regional house prices in the uk existing studies have failed to reach a consensus on whether or not regional house prices exhibit long run convergence with each other the application is proposed of a new test involving unit root testing of the first principal component based on regional national house price differentials using mix adjusted quarterly data for 1973 2006 it is found that the first principal component is stationary this suggests that all uk regional house prices are driven by a single common stochastic trend further analysis suggests that those regions that are more distant from london exhibit the highest degrees of persistence with respect to deviations in house price differentials

assessing global computable general equilibrium model validity using agricultural price volatility computable general equilibrium cge models are commonly used for global agricultural market analysis concerns are sometimes raised however about the quality of their output since key parameters may not be econometrically estimated and little emphasis is generally given to model assessment this article addresses the latter issue by developing an approach to validating cge models based on the ability to reproduce observed price volatility in agricultural markets we show how patterns in the deviations between model predictions and validation criteria can be used to identify the weak points of a model and guide development of improved specifications with firmer empirical foundations

regional spillover and rising connectedness in china s urban housing prices regional housing prices may be dynamically linked and converge to a long run equilibrium the level of connectedness can be used to describe systemic risk in the housing market this paper uses a r

beyond import substitution and export promotion a new typology of trade strategies there is considerable confusion in the literature as to what exactly is meant by export promotion or outward orientation this article identifies five mutually exclusive trade strategies and defines the underlying sectoral and market orientations of each it then measures empirically the strategies of six developing countries the empirical findings indicate that some of the successful east asian countries actually pursued an infant industry based exporter oriented protected export promotion strategy not the commonly perceived static comparative advantage based export promotion strategy their protectionist policies are not mere exceptions but integral elements of their export oriented strategy

empirical modelling of regional house prices and the ripple effect this paper investigates the stationarity properties and long run relationship of taiwan s regional house prices from 1993q1 to 2009q2 it applies the recent unit root test of the panel seemingly un

true protection concepts and their role in evaluating trade policies in ldcs in many ldcs it is not uncommon to find incentives designed to encourage import substitution activities coexisting alongside incentives aimed at encouraging export activities this article evaluates a recent approach to evaluating commercial policy which among other things highlights some of the implications of simultaneously pursuing import substitution and export promotion the study develops a model which emphasises the incidence of protection and identifies the concept of true protection empirical results for a number of ldcs are discussed and the implications of these results evaluated in addition the article contrasts this approach with the effective protection approach to evaluating commercial policy

spatial housing economics a survey this introduction to the virtual special issue surveys the development of spatial housing economics from its roots in neoclassical theory through more recent developments in social interactions modelling and touching on the role of institutions path dependence and economic history the survey also points to some of the more promising future directions for the subject that are beginning to appear in the literature the survey covers elements of hedonic models spatial econometrics neighbourhood models housing market areas housing supply models of segregation migration housing tenure subnational house price modelling including the so called ripple effect and agent based models possible future directions are set in the context of a selection of recent papers that have appeared in urban studies nevertheless there are still important gaps in the literature that merit further attention arising at least partly from emerging policy problems these include more research on housing and biodiversity

export restrictions and price insulation during commodity price booms for individual countries variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices if this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility this study shows the nature of the resulting collective action problem with the policy being ineffective on average in stabilizing domestic prices while increasing the volatility of the income transfers from terms of trade changes a simple approach to assessing the contribution of insulation to the price increases is developed and used with new estimates of agricultural distortions to assess its contribution to the price spikes in 1972 74 and 2006 08 for rice and wheat the analysis suggests that 45 percent of the increase in rice prices in 2006 08 and 30 percent of the increase in wheat prices was due to insulating behavior one sign of progress since 1972 74 was a substantial reduction in the extent of price insulating behavior by the industrial countries this provides little stabilizing benefit in the rice market because countries not classifying themselves at the world trade organization as developing account for only 3 percent of world rice consumption but it does offer some benefit for the wheat market where non developing countries account for 27 percent of consumption

implications of higher global food prices for poverty in low income countries in many poor countries the recent increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes of those selling food many of whom are relatively poor while hurting net food consumers many of whom are also relatively poor the impacts on poverty will certainly be very diverse but the average impact on poverty depends upon the balance between these two effects and can only be determined by looking at real world data results using household data for ten observations on nine low income countries show that the short run impacts of higher staple food prices on poverty differ considerably by commodity and by country but that poverty increases are much more frequent and larger than poverty reductions the recent large increases in food prices appear likely to raise overall poverty in low income countries substantially

self exciting effects of house prices on unit prices in australian capital cities this paper examines the long and short run relationship between australian house and unit prices across all capital cities over the period december 1995 to june 2015 we find that house and unit prices are cointegrated and based on the results of granger causality and generalised impulse responses that house prices significantly influence unit prices across all cities however bi directional causality responses exists only for major capital cities with the exception of brisbane we also for the first time apply self excited threshold models to explore the complex interplay between house and unit prices in australia we find that when the market for units is self excited or bullish the positive effects of house prices on unit prices are noticeably larger than otherwise there is a varying degree of herd mentality in the australian property market with sydney and darwin being the most and least excitable capital cities respectively

are house prices in south africa really nonstationary evidence from spsm based panel kss test with a fourier function this study applies the sequential panel selection method spsm to investigate the time series properties of provincial house prices for entire large medium and small middle segments of south africa quarterly time series data were collected from nine provinces in south africa for different house size categories over the period of 1978 q1 to 2012 q4 whereas other panel based unit root tests are joint tests of a unit root for all members of a panel and are incapable of determining the mix of integrated of order zero i 0 series and integrated of order one i 1 series in a panel setting the spsm proposed by chortareas and kapetanios 2009 can clearly identify how many and which series in the panel are stationary processes by classifying a whole panel into a group of stationary and nonstationary series the empirical results from several panel based as well as standard pure time series unit root tests indicate that house prices for the nine provinces studied here are either stationary or nonstati

a dual approach to evaluating research benefits in the presence of trade distortions we present a new approach for evaluating the welfare consequences of technical change a major feature is its ability to incorporate multiple distortions and multiple sources of technical change in interrelated markets a modified balance of trade function provides money measures of welfare change in terms of producer profits consumer expenditures and tax revenues alternative specifications of technical change are presented to capture the effects of differences in the form of technical change in an illustrative numerical example the approach is applied to a case involving two distortions and technical changes in two related markets the example shows that the approach is reasonably easy to use and that accounting correctly for price distortions can have important implications for research benefit measures

new developments in trade theory and ldcs abstract this paper surveys the new literature on international trade relevant to the north south controversy in the first part two types of north south models are considered the unequal exchange theory of lewis and emmanuel and the models of dynamic interaction of findlay taylor and others the analysis focuses on the determinants of growth the terms of trade and relative employment in the world economy in the second part the paper reviews the empirical literature on south north and south south trade and the theories of north south technological gaps intra industry trade and external economies finally we analyze the literature on exports and economic growth and the neo classical keynesian and disequilibrium approaches to the theory of import controls

testing for convergence between uk regional house prices drake l 1995 testing for convergence between uk regional house prices reg studies 29 357 366 this paper uses the kalman filter time varying parameter estimation technique to test for convergence between uk regional house prices this issue is significant given the historical disparities in regional house price inflation rates and the unprecedented downturn in both uk and most regional house prices in the late 1980s and early 1990s the evidence suggests that there are clear regional differences in the pattern of uk house price movements in particular house prices in the north and scotland show evidence of greater divergence from prices in the rest of the south east region than do the southern and midlands regions drake l 1995 une analyse pour determiner la convergence des prix du marche immobilier regionaux au royaume uni reg studies 29 357 366 cet article se sert de la technique dite kalman filter afin de determiner la convergence des prix du marche immobilier regionaux au royaume uni c

sterling s relationship with the dollar and the deutschemark 1976 89 this paper evaluates the linkages between bilateral exchange rates using a time varying parameter model which can be estimated using the kalman filter the technique solves many of the statistical problems which arise when ordinary least squares is used to estimate currency correlation applying the technique to the dollar sterling dm sterling and dm dollar bilateral exchange rates the results suggest a market weakening strengthening of sterling s relationship with the dollar dm since the mid 1970s additionally these currency linkages are shown to have undergone a number of regime shifts suggesting that the timing of the weakening of the dollar sterling relationship is different to that proposed by previous studies copyright 1991 by royal economic society

non renewable resource prices deterministic or stochastic trends in this paper we examine temporal properties of 11 natural resource real price series from 1870 to 1990 recent studies by ahrens and sharma trends in natural resource commodity prices deterministic or stochastic j environ econom manage 33 1997 59 74 berck and roberts natural resource prices will they ever turn up j environ econom manage 31 1996 65 78 and slade grade selection under uncertainty least cost last and other anomalies j environ econom manage 15 1988 189 205 among others find that many non renewable resource prices have a stochastic trend we revisit this issue by employing a lagrangian multiplier unit root test that allows for two endogenously determined structural breaks with and without a quadratic trend contrary to previous research we find evidence against the unit root hypothesis for all price series our findings support characterizing natural resource prices as stationary around deterministic trends with structural breaks we additionally show that both pre testing for unit roots with breaks and allowing for breaks in the forecast model can improve forecast accuracy overall the results in this paper are important in both a positive and normative sense without an appropriate understanding of the dynamics of a time series empirical verification of theories forecasting and proper inference are potentially fruitless