Understanding the World Wool Market: Trade, Productivity and Grower Incomes. Part 1: Introduction

This is the front matter and Chapter 1 of my PhD thesis Understanding the World Wool Market: Trade, Productivity and Grower Incomes, UWA, 2006. The full thesis is available as Discussion Papers 06.19 to 06.24. The core objective of this thesis is summarised by its title: “Understanding the World Wool Market: Trade, Productivity and Grower Incomes”. Thus, we wish to aid understanding of the economic mechanisms by which the world wool market operates. In doing so, we analyse two issues – trade and productivity – and their effect on, inter alia, grower incomes. To achieve the objective, we develop a novel analytical framework, or model. The model combines two long and rich modelling traditions: the partial-equilibrium commodity-specific approach and the computable-general-equilibrium approach. The result is a model that represents the world wool market in detail, tracking the production of greasy wool through five off-farm production stages ending in the production of wool garments.