Mexican Agricultural and Food Export Competitiveness

This report analyzes the export performance of the Mexican agricultural and food sector in recent years with a particular emphasis on the changing competitiveness of those exports in the U.S. and world markets. The report includes an examination of the general trends in Mexican agricultural and food exports, an analysis of the international competitiveness of the major subgroups of Mexican agriculture based on the Revealed Comparative Advantage methodology, an assessment of the competitiveness of Mexican exports of specific agricultural and food products to the United States, a consideration of the effectiveness of Mexico’s agricultural and food export market diversification efforts, a discussion of the main factors likely to affect the long-term competitiveness of Mexican agriculture, and policy recommendations for enhancing the competitiveness of Mexican agricultural and food exports.Mexican, Exports, Food Export, Mexican Food, Competitiveness, International Development, International Relations/Trade,

EUROPEAN UNION COTTON DEMAND: AN APPLICATION OF DEMAND SYSTEMS AND PANEL DATA

A demand system approach incorporating demographic variables is used to estimate the European Union cotton demand parameters. The European Union is the largest cotton importer of the world. Accurate estimation of European demand parameters is critical to evaluate world cotton trends and to realistically simulate future market scenarios. Unlike previous studies, this paper reports a research in which demands of the 15 European Union members are not aggregated. Moreover, unlike available estimations, the study does not use mill consumption data but cotton equivalent consumption at home.International Relations/Trade,

The Effect of Ethanol Production on Coarse Grains: New Price Relationships

For years, the U.S. price of grain sorghum has been settled as 95% of the price of corn. Nevertheless, the increasing demand for corn and grain sorghum in ethanol production might have changed that price relationship. In this study, we use cointegration and the vector autoregressive model with independent variable (VARX) to assess the relationship between the spot price of sorghum in several U.S. markets and corn’s futures market price during the period 1996–2008. The results indicate a price relationship between the price of sorghum in the Gulf ports, Kansas City, and Texas, and corn prices of 1.01, 0.99, and 0.99, respectively. These new relationships are noteworthy for producers and other stakeholders.causality test, cointegration, futures markets, VARX model, Agribusiness, Marketing,

Grain Sorghum International Trade: U.S.-Mexico Simulation and Estimation Model

An econometric international supply/demand/trade simulation and forecast sorghum model in a partial equilibrium framework is built in this research paper to quantify the effects of key exogenous variables on the U.S.-Mexico sorghum trade. A forecast baseline is also established by using the validated model and values of exogenous variables provided by FAPRI to project the level of endogenous variables over the period of 2009 to 2017. Impacts of plausible alternative scenarios for key exogenous variables are simulated from 2009 to 2017.Sorghum, International Trade, Simulation, Estimation, International Relations/Trade,