Modeling World Peanut Product Markets: A Tool For Agricultural Trade Policy Analysis

This paper presents a new partial-equilibrium, multi-market international model developed to analyze policies affecting peanut products markets. The model covers four goods (food-quality peanuts, crush-quality peanuts, peanut oil, and groundnut cake) in 13 countries/regions (Argentina, Canada, China, the EU-15, the Gambia, India, Malawi, Mexico, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, the United States, and Rest of World). Welfare is evaluated by looking at consumers' equivalent variation, quasi-profits in farming (peanut farming, livestock), quasi-profits in crushing, and taxpayers' revenues and outlays implied by distortions. We calibrate the model for three recent years (1999/2000, 2000/01, and 2001/02) on historical data. We illustrate the model's applicability with a peanut trade liberalization scenario. The impact of the reform scenario is measured in deviation from the historical baseline and by averaging the three estimates of annual impacts.