TESTING INTERNATIONAL PRICE TRANSMISSION UNDER ...

Concluding Remarks
Indeed, the study of the outcomes of the implementation of the URAA
provides insights about the effects of all liberalization reforms aimed at increasing
market access.
Moreover, analyzing the effects of reduction of the intervention prices is of a
crucial importance within the “Health Check” debate of the CAP, since a
substantial reduction of this mechanism is currently being proposed by the
European Commission.
However, a number of issues are left open for future research.
These basically stem from some of the simplistic assumption that necessarily
had to be made in the empirical applications proposed: the way in which unknown
transport costs are modelled; the presence of market power; other possible
exogenous drivers for the price dynamics; a more detailed study of the
homogeneity issue. In addition to this, a deeper analysis of the relation between
US and intervention prices, and especially of its evolution in time, can contribute
to better understand the French and US price dynamics.
Finally, it should be recalled that, in this work, the use of data which would
allow to go back in time has been preferred although this, in turn, implied the
impossibility of studying the latest years. In this respect, some additional
considerations emerge considering the most recent market dynamics: the dramatic
rise in energy prices (and in freight rates) could increase the complexity of the
assumptions made on transaction costs; moreover, soaring food prices caused
remarkable changes in the institutional settings of international trade.
The effects of more recent policy and market developments should be the
object of further research; considering the evolving international context goes then
well beyond the use of more recent data, and probably represents the most
interesting possibility of developing the framework presented.
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