Market Liberalization Policy

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Market Liberalization policies were part of the structural adjustment programs (SAP) required by the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a prerequisite to obtaining loans from the two institutions in the 1980s. The SAPs were introduced to address the economic problems faced by most African countries at the time. Under market liberalization policies, recipient countries had to open up previously state controlled agricultural markets to allow the private sector to participate in agricultural marketing. The rationale for market liberalization policies was that removing state protectionist policies would increase formerly depressed prices, thereby providing incentives for increased production among producers. In addition, the …show more content…

Market liberalization proponents expected the the increase in prices from market liberalization to provide incentives to farmers for increased production. However, production levels did not increase as expected. In fact most Sub Saharan Africa countries have stagnating and in some cases declining per capita production levels (Delgado Christopher, Gabre-Madhin, Minot, & Johnson, 2002; Jayne, Govereh, Mwanaumo, Nyoro, & Chapoto, 2002). Figure 1 below confirms the declining production trend for Sub Saharan African countries. The low response to price change shows that market liberalization approach to improving food security has not been …show more content…

Market integration studies measure price transmission across markets by looking at long-term price trends. Indeed higher market integration would indicate that high price differences between markets would induce trade across markets until the difference is traded away (Rashid & Minot, 2010). Highly integrated markets help to balance food access across markets and facilitate food security. However, these market integration studies have failed to take into account transaction costs and trade quantities, both of which are important for understanding market integration (Barrett, 1996; Baulch, 1997). To illustrate, in cases where the price difference is lower than transfer costs, trade would not occur, but price based market integration tests would indicate that the markets are integrated. Therefore, unless market integration analyses incorporates transaction cost and trade date, the results will be misleading. The more recent threshold autoregressive models that account for transaction costs and trade quantities are a better alternative to the methods used by Goletti and Babu (1994); Rashid and Minot

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