Evaluating Public Grain Buffer Stocks in China: a Stochastic Simulation Model

A stochastic simulation model, with adaptive expectation and multiplicative production shocks, is advocated to investigate the impacts of public grain buffer stocks in China. The effects of alternative public buffer stocks, with three price bands and nine storage capacity levels, are investigated from the perspectives of producer support, market stabilization, food security and social costs. The simulation results show that a narrow price band can improve policy performances and the storage capacity has marginal diminishing effects on above policy performances. For a given width of the price band, the symmetric price band could achieve policy goals at a relatively low cost. In practice, the Chinese government can lower floor price and restrict storage capacity in order to improve Minimum Price Procurement policies of rice and wheat. Acknowledgement : I would like to thank Yu Cheng from Development Research Center of the State Council of China, Xiaohua Yu from Georg-August-University of G ttingen, Chen Zhen for University of Georgia for comments on an earlier draft. This study is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China; under Grant [number 71673289]; Doctoral thesis scholarship of China Institute of Rural Studies, Tsinghua University [number 201525].