Impacts of Stockholding Behaviour onAgricultural Market Volatility:A Dynamic Computable General Equilibrium Approach

摘要

Successive CAP reforms raise the question of whetherit can have a price-stabilizing capability. In this contextmore and more attention is being paid to privaterisk-managing instruments such as storage. Theeffects of storage have already been widely studiedin the economic literature. But hardly any of thesestudies take account of the links between producers’,households’ and stockholders’ intertemporal decisionsand, in particular, they do not use a dynamicCGE model. Furthermore, a large number of previousstudies focus on the effect of stockholding on pricevolatility due to exogenous shocks and assume rationalexpectations. It is more the endogenous aspect ofrisk, induced by expectation errors, that has oftenbeen used to justify public intervention in agriculturalmarkets. In this paper we construct a model addressingthese issues and we conduct some illustrativesimulations. Some of our results are at variance withthe conclusions of previous economic studies concerningthe effects of speculative storage on market volatilities.We also reveal the vital role played by theform of economic agents’ expectations and by thelinks between the intertemporal decisions of marketparticipants.