Browsing by Author "Countryman, Amanda, advisor"

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Open Access
Not so sweet: potential economic implications of restricting U.S. sugar imports from Mexico
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Sinclair, Wilson James, author; Countryman, Amanda, advisor; Graff, Gregory, committee member; Cutler, Harvey, committee member
In December 2014, the U.S. and Mexican governments signed a bilateral agreement constraining Mexico's ability to export sugar to the U.S. because of dumping allegations by U.S. producers. This restriction came after six years of unlimited, tariff-free access to the U.S. market for Mexican sugar producers through the North American Free Trade Agreement. This analysis employs a twenty-eight country partial equilibrium model to estimate the price and welfare impacts of this bilateral trade agreement. Estimates suggest that the agreement successfully increases U.S. price by curbing imports from Mexico. These results translate to an average annual increase in producer surplus of approximately $620 million and decrease in consumer surplus of $1.48 billion across the five-year period simulated.
Open Access
Potential economic implications of a U.S. – ASEAN FTA on agriculture
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Miller, Chelsey Alexandra, author; Countryman, Amanda, advisor; Hill, Alexandra, committee member; Pena, Anita, committee member
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is both an agricultural trade partner of the U.S. and a key contributor to the global agricultural market. The implementation of a free trade agreement (FTA) between the U.S. and ASEAN has the potential to reduce or eliminate tariffs on agricultural commodities. This research employs a computable general equilibrium modeling framework to simulate the economic implications of agricultural trade liberalization between the U.S. and ASEAN. Results focus on simulated changes in import quantities and prices, agricultural export sales, production, GDP, and welfare in the U.S. and ASEAN given the full elimination of tariffs on agricultural trade between the two partners. Results show that the U.S. is expected to generate a net welfare gain of $1.9 billion, while the ASEAN region is likely to have a net welfare loss of $415 million.
Open Access
Potential impacts of hard infrastructure development on agricultural trade
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Al-Maamari, Aaisha, author; Countryman, Amanda, advisor; Thilmany, Dawn, committee member; Pena, Anita, committee member
The development of hard infrastructure has the potential to enhance agricultural production and international agricultural trade. Good quality physical networks could reduce the transport costs for producers and suppliers, thereby increasing the volume of agricultural bilateral trade. For most countries, tariff rates, transport costs, geographic drawbacks, and other nontariff barriers are considered to be the most significant potential impediments to trade. This study estimates the role of hard infrastructure on agricultural bilateral trade among North and Latin American countries, as one determinant of transport costs. By using panel data for agricultural imports from 2006 to 2014, we measure the potential impact of the quality of overall hard infrastructure as well as specific modes of transport networks such as roads, railroads, ports and airports infrastructure on the prevalence and patterns of agricultural trade. A modified gravity model of trade has been used to measure the impact of different trade barriers on the trade of food, animal, vegetable and aggregated agricultural products. Results show that the distance between countries and hard infrastructure are statistically significant and play an important role in determining transport costs as well as the variation in agricultural bilateral trade. For both aggregated and disaggregated agricultural trade, the estimated coefficients show that exporters' infrastructure has a larger impact on trade than importers' infrastructure. Results show that a 10 percent improvement in the quality of an exporters' hard infrastructure may increase total agricultural import volume by 8.6 percent, while a 10 percent improvement in importers' hard infrastructure may increase aggregated agricultural imports by 6.0 percent.
Open Access
Quality and price impacts on U.S. demand for lamb imports
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Ufer, Danielle Jayne, author; Countryman, Amanda, advisor; Bonanno, Alessandro, committee member; Delmore, Robert, committee member
The U.S. lamb industry has changed in the last decade, potentially impacting the structure of the import industry, which has become necessary to meet domestic demand. Domestic production has continued to decline, consumer demographics have shifted to reflect a growing ethnic consumer population, and promotional efforts have been met with varying degrees of success. This work updates previous research to evaluate how changes in the industry may affect import demand using a differential production model approach, and extends the literature to evaluate the role of boneless/bone-in product differentiation in importer demand using an absolute price version of the Rotterdam model. Results indicate that the structure of the lamb import market has remained relatively consistent across the past three decades, even with the inclusion of an additional fifteen years of data. Importers appear to have become less responsive to changes in prices, with demand for all imports becoming more inelastic. Product differentiation is found to play an important role in import demand, with boneless and bone-in products showing evidence of separability. Source-specific association with different product qualities appear to be emerging, with preference for frozen lamb from New Zealand and chilled lamb from Australia, with frozen Australian lamb demonstrating shrinking influence within the market. Overall, as imports become essential to meet U.S. domestic demand for lamb, the boneless and bone-in imported lamb markets both display low variability in an increasingly inelastic lamb import market that has become more insensitive to price changes over time.
Open Access
Three essays on economics of highly pathogenic avian influenza
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Thompson, Jada, author; Countryman, Amanda, advisor; Pendell, Dustin, advisor; Hadrich, Joleen, committee member; Magzamen, Sheryl, committee member
Highly pathogenic disease can affect trade between countries. How health officials in an affected country manage a disease event can affect the potential impacts of a disease event. Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) and exotic Newcastle disease (ND) are two diseases that affect poultry industries and it is important to understand the ramifications of having an event of either of these diseases. The implications of an outbreak are first felt internally, where domestic markets are affected through changes in stocks and price changes. Secondly, the impacts are external. These external impacts can come in the form of potential trade bans from importing countries as a result of health concerns. This work analyzes both of these impacts to provide a holistic understanding of a HPAI or ND event on U.S. poultry markets. The first essay models the U.S. egg layer industry to estimate the producer and consumer impacts of a regionalized disease outbreak to compare the benefits of using business continuity during a disease event. The estimated value of business continuity during a hypothetical disease event is $13.6 million in two quarters. The second essay then determines the factors that affect trade quantities for exporting countries including the effect of a disease outbreak on the quantity traded. Highly pathogenic avian influenza is found to change the composition of trade between different product categories, providing exporters a better understanding of how product mixture might change during a disease event. The third essay builds on the methodology of the second essay to compare modeling properties of an improved estimator in determining the factors that affect bilateral trade quantities. There are small efficiency gains captured by using a systems approach, but data are limited due to the methodology, causing a tradeoff between usable bilateral trade data and efficiency gains in estimation. The three essays combined provide an overview of how a highly pathogenic disease outbreak can affect U.S. markets for poultry products both domestically and internationally.