Market Regulation and Productivity: The Case of the Canadian Wheat Board

AKSOB 1617 (Beirut Campus)

Abstract: 

The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) was a state-trading enterprise that controlled sale and distribution of wheat and barley produced in Western Canada from 1943 to 2012. The CWB has been investigated as a source of several market effects, including prices and spatial production patterns. We investigate how deregulation of the CWB affected farm-level productivity for regulated crops. Field-level production and input data for 13,000 farms over 17 years are used to generate a within-farm difference-in-difference estimate of how relative productivity changed between regulated and unregulated crops when the CWB’s single-desk mandate was removed. Our within-farm approach identifies the effects of regime change on regulated crops while controlling for many of the factors (unobserved time-varying factors at the farm level) that confound productivity measurement in other approaches. We do not find significant effects of the CWB on farm-level productivity across all fields in our sample, but we identify negative productivity effects of the CWB on relatively unproductive land, and on farms with more experience marketing their unregulated crops outside the single-desk authority of the CWB. This research contributes to the understanding of how sweeping policy interventions can affect firm-level productivity, and to the productivity literature by developing an estimation strategy for identifying productivity effects at the firm level.

About the Speaker: 

Dr. Pascal Ghazalian is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. He is also an Affiliated Researcher at the Prentice Institute for Global Population and Economy and a Research Fellow at the Global Labor Organization (GLO). He earned his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Saskatchewan in 2006, and his M.S. and S.P.U.D. in Economics from the International Center for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies-Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (ICAMAS-MAICh). He previously served as a post-doctoral research fellow at Université Laval and has been a visiting scholar at several universities, including the University of British Columbia and Nyenrode Business Universiteit. He is a member of multiple professional associations and has served on the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics and the Board of Directors of the Canadian Agricultural Economics Society. His research focuses on International Economics, Development Economics, Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Applied Econometrics, with additional interests in Environmental and Labour Economics. Key research topics include Trade Policy, Foreign Direct Investment, Research and Development, and Economics of Developing Countries.