运输成本可以解释空间市场整合中的交易成本吗?——来自中国小麦和玉米市场的证据

Can Transportation Cost Explain Transaction Cost in Spatial Market Integration? Evidences from China's Local Wheat and Maize Markets

本文提供了一种从交易成本的视角分析空间市场整合问题的思路。以中国小麦市场和玉米市场为例，本文首先采用阈值误差修正模型识别了中国20个地区的小麦市场之间和27个地区的玉米市场之间的交易成本，进而以运输距离和运输方式作为运输成本的替代变量实证分析了运输成本对交易成本的影响。结论显示，虽然不同地区的小麦和玉米价格数据都具有良好的协整效果，但从交易成本的角度来看，运输成本只能解释交易成本40％～50％的变差，并不能认为中国小麦和玉米市场是高度整合或高效运行的统一市场。

From the perspective of transaction cost,this paper provides a new approach of analyzing spatial market integration.Taking China's wheat and maize markets as examples,we firstly identified transaction costs,with the method of threshold vector error correction model(TVECM),respectively among 20 local wheat markets and among 27 local maize markets.Afterwards,transportation mode and distance was used as proxies to estimate the influence of transportation costs on transaction costs.Results show that although the prices of all local wheat and maize markets are highly co-integrated,transportation costs can only explain 40 percent to 50 percent of the variation of transaction costs,which implies China's wheat and market markets are still far from a highly integrated and efficient national unified market.