This article reviews the outcome of the transformation of a centrally planned into a market economy over the past two decades in the case of agriculture in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region. It focuses on the question of how transition progress in the region's agriculture can be evaluated and compared adequately. The article presents a set of arguments to question some of the conventional wisdom in the existing literature on what success and failure are in the transition of the ECA region's agriculture. In particular, it challenges the usefulness of counterfactuals that are commonly used in the existing literature to appraise transition progress such as pre-reform output levels, individualised farming structures and WTO-conforming agricultural market regulation. Against this background the widespread view that agricultural reform in the advanced CIS countries has, in general, been less successful than in the new EU member states is questioned.
Increasing grain price volatility over the last year has revived the discussion on optimal marketing strategies. Various models of optimal grain marketing have been proposed and simulated in the literature. In this study, an overview of these models is presented and critical aspects are discussed. Optimal strategies are then applied to the wheat market in Germany and Poland. The results show that gains from optimal marketing are rather small and uncertain in the real world, indicating that scientific assistance may be of limited importance when using only publicly available information. However, an understanding of optimization and price-generating processes is likely to improve farmers' decisions-in particular when additional (private) information to improve price forecasts is available.
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