TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kozicka, Marta
A1  - Kalkuhl, Matthias
A1  - Brockhaus, Jan
T1  - Food Grain Policies in India and their Implications for Stocks and Fiscal Costs
BT  - a Dynamic Partial Equilibrium Analysis
JF  - Journal of Agricultural Economics
N2  - We analyse current and possible future reforms of the Indian food policies for the most important staple grains, wheat and rice, within a two-commodity dynamic partial equilibrium model with stochastic shocks. The model is empirically grounded and reproduces past values well. It uses a new reduced-form approach to capture private storage dynamics. We evaluate the implementation of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) under several policy measures with the current regime as well as two scenarios with a regime change - implementation of cash transfers and deficiency payments. Implications for market fundamentals and fiscal costs are simulated in the medium term - until 2020/21. The NFSA puts a high pressure on fiscal costs and public stocks. Relying on imports with low support prices results in low fiscal costs and stable, but higher domestic and international prices, and a high risk of zero stocks. A policy strategy to manipulate procurement prices in order to maintain public stocks close to the norms leads to slightly higher fiscal costs with lower, but more volatile prices. The highest domestic price volatility occurs under a strategy which uses export bans in order to maintain sufficient public stocks. A cash-based regime can bring considerable savings and curb fiscal costs, particularly if targeted to the poor, and would leave sufficient stocks due to higher private stocks.
KW  - Fiscal costs
KW  - food grain policies
KW  - grain storage
KW  - India
KW  - NFSA
KW  - reforms
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/1477-9552.12176
SN  - 0021-857X
SN  - 1477-9552
VL  - 68
IS  - 1
SP  - 98
EP  - 122
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -