Journal of Agricultural Economics and Development
Year:2007 | Volume:15 | Issue:57 (SPECIAL EDITION AGRICULTURAL MARKETS)|Papers Count:10

This research is an endeavor to delineate the structure of world (product trade) market for date, the structure of Iran's date export and its trade partners, and target markets for Iran's date export. Thus, its major parts are as follows: introduction, theoretical and methodological (for both market structure and target markets), world product and trade structure of date, and conclusion and suggestion. According to the findings, the world product structure of date has been an oligopolistic one alone with fluctuations during 1989-2001.A supply - side examination of date world trade reflects a modification and mitigation in the nature of export vis-a-vis the existence of an oligopolistic structure in import. A comparative study of world trade structure of date indicated that import is more oligopolistic than export. As to the structure of Iran's date export to his trade partners, importers of Iran's date export to his trade partners, importers of Iran's date have not been of the same position: during 1979-88, Iran's bargaining power vis-a-vis other date importers was continuously diminishing during 1989-2001 and particularly during the first development- plan, the monopolistic power of those partners/importers declined due to increasing number of date importing countries. It is worth noting that the major Iran's date importing countries oftener-export Iran's date to final consumer markets.In this research 29 countries have been recognized as target markets of Iran's date export and the research is concluded with some final remarks and policy suggestions.

Majority of studies that have used AIDS in Iranian economy, have faced major problems for an improper choices in approaching index and the method of estimation, and also in price elasticity formula. The main goal of this paper is introducing the econometrics debates in relation to AIDS, and the use of it in surveying the price and income elasticity for different kinds of meat in urban areas of Iran during the years 1960-2000. The results show that different kinds of meat are considered as an unnecessary and inelastic product in urban areas. Therefore any charges in their prices are not to be a good lever to reform the consumption model. The results from estimating the elasticity indicate that chicken- fish and chicken - red meat is gross substitutes and red meat and fish are gross supplementary. Also it was shown that the substitution relationship between chicken and fish is stronger and all meats are Hix-Allen substitutes for each other.

Too much bulk of vegetable oil import shows its importance in consumption & production programming in our country. In this paper, for analyzing the soya oil import demand pattern from supplier countries, we estimated soya oil import demand from two main Exporter, Brazil & Argentina, using two-stage budgeting and source differentiated almost ideal demand system (SDAIDS).The results in 1983-2001 periods showed that domestic production could not meet domestic needs, therefore, soya oil import, without touching changes in import price, has a high volume. The soya oil import from Brazil and Argentina has the same behavior in soya oil import demand pattern in Iran, although income elasticity for Argentina soya oil is more sensitive than Brazil soya oil.More properties and different applying in vegetable oil like soya oil, sun flower oil and olive oil, explain more investment and attention in this subject.

Because of our significant topographical condition, climate and suitable soil, our country is one of the most potential potato-regions in West East. But because of having a lot of problems, not all its potentials can be used effectively.One of the major problems of the agricultural product market in our country is deep disparity between farm price (money that is received by producer) and price that is paid by consumer, (despite of insufficient marketing services), in other words a high margin in marketing in Iran.This research introduces the marketing channel and studies the effective factors on potato marketing margin by using the software E-views and Microfit, using an econometric model and the analysis conclusions. The projection was based on data time trend of 1982- 2001.Results of this research show that production, exporting, and transportation expenditure indexes are considered to be the effective and important factors in potato marketing margin. Problems encountered in potato marketing can be derived from the characteristics of potato" production (small scale of planting area), characteristics of crops (bulkiness perish ability), the nature of supply (seasonality), peculiarities of the potato marketing system (poor information flows, the prevalence of market activities with different financial capacity,...), instability and fluctuation of price, lack of qualitative standards, sorting, grading, packaging and etc.

In this study, using a sample of 300 pistachio producers and 38 pistachio traders, the possibility of participation in the future of agriculture and option markets in Iran was evaluated by logit model and variance analysis. The results showed that more than 93% of pistachio producers and traders can understand the performance of these markets. The results, also, showed that, farmers and traders have enough motivations to engage in futures and option markets. In this regard, the farmers' (traders') participation rates are 35.77% and 59.61% (50% and 61%) for futures and options respectively. In addition, 70.47% of farmers and 77% of traders will at least participate in one of future or options. The most important obstacle to participate in future is pistachio yield risk. But cultural problems, financial difficulties, and unreliability of option market are the most important factors in this connection. At last some solutions to the above problems were proposed.

This study has considered the demand for main groups of goods and foods in urban families in Iran by using two-stage budgeting. In this case, we used the data during 1979-2002. It has used the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) to estimate expenditure share equations for main groups of goods and foods. For analyzing the demand of each kind of goods and foods, it has calculated the own and cross price elasticity and expenditure elasticity for them. The results of this study have indicated that; in the first stage and for urban society, foods are inelastic with respect to income and compensated price, and have elasticity near one respect to uncompensated price. In urban society, foods have lower income elasticity and it shows that these goods are necessary for urban consumers. The results show that in urban societies, housing and transportation groups are luxury goods and other groups are necessary and in urban families food bundle, the whole main food groups have high price elasticity and most of them have high income elasticity.

One of the major tasks of the applied economics is establishing and clarifying the suitable and applied models in production and consumption economics. AIDS is one of the models developed in debates on consumer's side. Hilmer and Relt using this system managed rebuild an AIDS for the consumer and introduced it as an appropriate model and a substitute for other models such as Translog model.In this paper, using this model and making some changes in it, the applied model for producer was made clarified and then the irrigated wheat input demand (IWID) was surveyed. The results show that the direct elasticity related to IWID was negative and less than positive cost elasticity and unit. Compatibility of the above mentioned findings with the related economic theories makes an emphasis on the effectiveness of the AIDS.

Today the use of hedonic pricing model has been paid attention to in different industries to define the quality and desirability the costumers consider. In this model each one of the coefficients is implicit price of every one of the features in the model. Since in local cheese industry there are some problems such as the low consumption per capita, the roots of these problems are investigated in Tehran through using a questionnaire. The major causes mentioned by the consumers here are lack of variety in products, lack of knowledge about the nutrition value of cheese, and lack of narrowing the distance between the features of this product and consumer's desirability.Regarding the fact that not loving the taste of produced cheese by the consumer is the main cause to have a low consumption, for investigating the relationship between the cost and the quality features of the cheese, HP Model has been used. The findings from this model show that among the quality features of cheese the amount of fat, salt, and the hardness of its texture in addition to the packaging form the most important causes to affect consumer price. Consequently, governmental policies on increasing local production capacity and per capita consumption should be directed in accord with consumer's taste and desirability.

In this paper cross and own price elasticity and income elasticity of 13 cost groups including 9 edible and 4 non-edible groups are estimated for three rural, urban and the whole societies by the use of AIDS. For this purpose the statistics of households' budget (rural and urban) for the years 1992- 1997 presented by Iranian Statistics Center are used. The findings show that income and price elasticity are (even in a global scale) high for cloths and low for health and treatment. Among the food items, diaries enjoy the most and cereals enjoy the least price elasticity when the income elasticity in meat and rice is the highest compared to other food items.