Government programs that restrict production and increase prices to particular groups of producers have a long history in the United States. The purpose of this research is to analyze the implications of such a program for peanuts in three independent essays. The first essay focuses on the development of a model of the effects of cross-county transfers on peanut quota after the 1996 farm bill. Using a spatial linear regression model, the hypothesis that the lifting of transfer restrictions tends to equilibrate lease rates across counties is tested. The results indicate that, after the 1996 bill, peanut quota moved out of counties that under produce their quota to overproducing counties, indirectly indicating a tendency for lease rates to equalize. The second essay studies the most recent changes to the peanut program, enacted by the U.S. Congress in 2002, and reviews important events that led to these changes. Several models are developed that analyze the costs and benefits of the revised program in domestic and foreign markets. It is concluded that farmers in most peanut producing states will incur losses due to the peanut program changes, with the exception of Texas and Florida. The impact of the transformation on the world price of edible peanuts is analyzed and shown to be theoretically ambiguous-- the world price could either increase or decrease depending on demand and supply elasticities. The essay explores numerically the influence of the relevant elasticities. The third essay reviews the U.S. federal crop insurance program and investigates its interaction with the peanut program. A model of a risk neutral profit maximizing farmer is developed and comparative static results are derived. The results show that in equilibrium peanut quota lease rates do not represent the full difference between the support price and world price and are affected by the cost of crop insurance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NCSU/oai:NCSU:etd-07222002-001808 |
| Date | 01 August 2002 |
| Creators | Chvosta, Jan |
| Contributors | Walter N. Thurman, Blake A. Brown, Matthew T. Holt, Marc G. Genton |
| Publisher | NCSU |
| Source Sets | North Carolina State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-07222002-001808/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to NC State University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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