Assessing the Impact of Recent Trade Policy Changes in the Banana Market under Alternative Market Structures

The paper focuses on the importance of the assumptions made about market structure andfirm behaviors in empirical trade policy analysis. It addresses this issue with reference torecent changes in the EU import regime for bananas, namely the Economic PartnershipAgreements and the December 2009 WTO agreement on bananas. The paper?s contributionto the literature on the issues addressed is threefold: first it develops two original modelswhich incorporate imperfectly competitive market structures in a spatial modelingframework; then it proposes a methodology to assess the degree of market power ininternational trading which is applied to the banana market and, finally, it assesses howanalysis of the implications of the most recent changes in the EU import regimes for bananasis affected by the assumptions made on the prevailing market structure.