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Emerging economies often establish commodity futures markets to discover price signals, manage price risks and improve market integration, but establishing a futures market may not be feasible for agricultural perishables. In this study, we evaluated the function of the world's first fresh fruit futures contract for apples. Combining partial cointegration with state-space modelling, we derived time-varying price discovery metrics for the apple futures market. Our findings revealed a limited and time-varying dominance of price discovery by the futures market, while a substantial share of price discovery occurred in the spot market. Moreover, poor convergence of disaggregated spot prices to the futures price suggests that commercial traders in the apple supply chain tended to focus more on the spot market than on the futures market. Thus, emerging economies should be cautious about the new establishment of futures markets for agricultural perishables. Future research using more specific data on the spot market may provide a better insight on the limited function of the futures market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The causes of food price spikes are complex, and their impact on different countries varies depending on production levels and the varied policies in place. Countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus (CAC) region have implemented a wide range of reforms that vary in form and speed. The existing scientific literature reports about the consequences of price spikes in CAC; however, to date, a comparison of impact between those countries has not been made in terms of the entire supply chain perspective. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of the price spikes on the entire wheat supply chain for the first time in CAC and discusses the role of policies. Another contribution of this study is an evidence-based analysis of the role of policy reformation in maintaining food security under price shocks. Our results indicate a very limited effect of price interventions and trade restrictions on dampening wheat prices in all countries. We find that only trade diversification policy had a positive effect on reducing the level of price spikes, and thus it might be a suitable policy measure for maintaining food security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether the US Farm Bill 2008 has any impacts on china's agriculture, is highly related to the china's rural poverty alleviation and it deserves to be explored to see what will happen. According the existing empirical studies in the past, we expect that the US Farm Bill 2008 will exert an influence on the agricultural production and rural poverty in developing countries, especially china. In order to fully capture such an effect, we link two equilibrium models together: the multinational CGE model - GTAP and the china's partial equilibrium model -- the china's Agricultural Policy Simulation and Projection Model (CAPSiM). A scenario based on the US Farm Bill 2008 will be constructed and compared with the baseline. A more liberalized scenario is also built for the simulation. The results have shown that the US Farm Bill 2008 has a little positive impact on the china's farmer income, and that the more liberalized the policy is, the more china will benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]