Drawing upon unique transaction-level data from rural Ethiopia, this paper tests for general forms of imperfect competition among rural wholesale traders. These are key to the grain distribution system as they purchase from farmers and perform interregional trade. Tests show that traders in a typical source market engage in imperfectly competitive behavior in purchasing from farmers, driving do...

A formula for deriving the price of SEW pigs using grain, soybean meal, and market hog prices was estimated based on return on investment being equal for all three phases of production – farrow, nursery, and finish. USDA reported SEW pig prices were compared with formula-derived prices. The level of correlation between these two series was sensitive to how grain, soybean meal, and market hog pr...

In recent years, food security, especially supply, has been an important issue in China’s agricultural production. The stability of grain prices is related to the stability and development of the grain market. Based on agricultural production data from 1970 to 2015, this paper explores the influence of agricultural product price fluctuation on grain production by using the cobweb theory and vec...

Japan is one of the largest importers of wheat in the world, with imports originating from three countries, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Australia, Canada, and Japan all use a government single-desk agency to control wheat trade. Many previous studies on competition in the world grain trade have argued the market is imperfectly competitive, and they often point to the Japanese mark...

Existing electricity market segmentation analysis techniques only make use of limited consumption statistics (usually averages and variances). In this paper we use power demand distributions (PDDs) obtained from fine-grain smart meter data to perform market segmentation based on distributional clustering. We apply this approach to mining 8 months of readings from about 1000 US Google employees.

Sorghum and pearl millet are two important dry land crops that provide grain and fodder. India is the largest pearl millet producer and second largest producer of sorghum in the world. The productivity of these crops has been low due to various reasons such as unavailability of quality inputs to the farmers, lack of access to improved technologies for crop production, unavailability of credit o...

In this paper, we study the efficiency of the Chinese wheat and soybeans futures markets and assess the conditions in agricultural commodity futures and cash markets in China. Formal statistical tests are conducted through Johansen's cointegration approach to identify the long-term equilibrium relationship between futures and cash markets. Three different cash prices from Zhengzhou Grain Wholes...

PROBLEM: Before the cereals market reforms of the 1980s, food policies in Mali were aimed at securing cheap cereal supplies to urban consumers (government employees, students, the military, etc.). To achieve this objective, the government fixed the prices of the major food crops both pan-seasonally and pan-territorially and required forced deliveries to the national grain board. The grain board...

The omission of relevant independent variables in the estimation of agricultural production functions gives rise to mis-specification and biased estimators. Using disaggregated household survey data, this study finds that official positions and education of household heads are important determinant of grain output in rural China and should be incorporated into the production functions. The impa...

Wheat grain quality assessment is important in meeting market requirements. The thickness of grains can be used for the measurement of the mass proportion of grains that pass through a sieve. This measure is known as ‘‘screenings’’. The determination of the presence or absence of the grain crease aids the detection of a stain called blackpoint, which is usually most evident on the non-crease si...