Supply Response in Broadacre Agriculture

This paper describes a mathematical programming model of broadacre agriculture in Australia and presents estimates of national and regional supply responses made with it. Own-price and cross-price supply elasticities are presented for wool sheep meat, beef and crops and the results compared with those of two other major models of Australian agriculture. It is shown that long term supply responses for the commodities studied are substantially greater than unity as are cross-price elasticities in a number of cases. It is also shown that supply responses differ substantially between regions