Analysis of the relationship between garlic and onion acreage response

Abstract

Garlic and onion are staple agricultural products to Koreans and also are important with regard to agricultural producers’ income. These products’ acreage responses are highly correlated with each other. Therefore, it is necessary to test whether there is a cointegration relationship between garlic acreage and onion acreage when one tries to estimate the acreage response’s function. Based upon the test result of cointegration, it is confirmed that there is no statistically significant cointegration relationship between garlic acreage and onion acreage. In this case, vector autoregressive model is preferred to vector error correction model. This study investigated the dynamic relationship between garlic and onion acreage responses using vector autoregressive (VAR) model. The estimated results of VAR acreage response models show that there is a statistically significant relationship between current and lagged acreage of more than one lag. Therefore, it is recommended that government should consider the long-run period’s relationship of each product’s acreage when it plans a policy for stabilizing the supply and demand of garlic and onion. For the price variables, garlic price only affects garlic acreage response while onion price affects not only onion acreage response but also garlic acreage response. This implies that the stabilizing policy for onion price could have bigger effects than that for garlic price stabilization.