Three Essays on the World Rice Market: A Structure, Conduct, and Performance Paradigm Approach

In the past several decades, the international rice market has undergone major changes experiencing a strong expansion in traded volumes and in the volatility of rice prices. International rice prices are, furthermore, expected to remain at relatively high levels because of higher fertilizer and fuel prices, especially as stocks held by those exporters still allow unrestrained sales.With this instability in the world rice market, we need to consider the structure, conduct, and performance (S-C-P) of the world rice market. The main objective of this dissertation will be to examine the world rice market based on S-C-P methods.This dissertation consists of three essays relating to the structure, conduct, and performance of the world rice market. The first essay is entitled Structure and Conduct of the World Rice Market. This chapter analyzes the working of the world rice market within the confines of the structure-conduct-performance framework and uses annual data from 1970 to 2007. The second essay is entitled The Relationships of Trade, Economic Growth, and Market Power: The Case of Rice Exporting Countries. This essay aims to analyze the relationship between rice exports and how this relationship affects economic growth in the top four rice exporting countries as well as the effects market power has on economic growth using annual data from 1994 to 2007. The third essay will be entitled An Empirical Estimation of the Import Demand Model and Welfare Effects: The Case of Rice Importing Countries. This section estimates an import demand function and analyzes the welfare effects for the world rice market using annual data from 1994 to 2007.Results show that market power exists in the international rice market based on static calculation and hypothesis test, the international rice trade and economic growth for major rice exporting countries (which is a bi-directional relationship), and reductions of consumer surplus all combine to have a crucial effect on major rice importing countries due to the recent trends in export rice prices.