High food price instability is one of the major risks facing agricultural households from developing countries. Resulting from agronomic factors as well as the historically low levels of world grain stocks and climate change, increased food price volatility has attracted renewed interest among policy experts in identifying appropriate policy instruments to counter its effects. This paper applie...

P olicy makers in housing sector seeks to use instruments by which they can control volatility of housing price and prevent high disturbances of the bubble and price shocks, or at least, reduce them. In the portfolio and speculation theories, it is emphasized that speculative demand for housing is the main cause of shocks and price volatilities in the sector. The theory of housing price bu...

We describe a multistage, stochastic, mixed-integer programming model for planning capacity expansion of production facilities. A scenario tree represents uncertainty in the model; a general mixed-integer program defines the operational submodel at each scenario-tree node, and capacity-expansion decisions link the stages. We apply “variable splitting” to two model variants, and solve those vari...

Given the large share of major staples in the budgets of the poor, governments in many developing countries intervene in food markets to limit variation in the prices of staple foods. This paper examines the recent experience of Madagascar in stabilizing prices through international trade and the implications of adjustments in tariff rates. Using a partial equilibrium model, we quantify the ove...

a r t i c l e i n f o A good harvest usually leads to a collapse of agricultural prices since the price elasticity of agricultural products is relatively low. To stabilize the market and protect farmers, many countries have introduced a target zone policy, together with product purchasing or price subsidy strategies. This article analyzes the effect of a target zone with different strategies op...