PRICING BEHAVIOUR OF KAZAKH, RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN EXPORTERS IN THE INTERNATIONAL WHEAT MARKET

There are a lot of empirical studies which examine the pricing behavior of agricultural good exporters and find pricing-to-market behavior by grain exporters in the destination countries. By investigating mainly the U.S., Canadian and Australian wheat exporters’ pricing behavior, Pick and Carter (1994), Yang and Lee (2001), Lavoie (2005) and others argue that wheat exporters exercise pricing to market behavior, meaning that they price discriminate (set different prices) and achieve different markup of prices over marginal costs in some destination countries due to the exchange rate volatility. One of the recent studies by Pall et al. (2013) considers pricing behavior of the Russian exporters and concludes that Russia can implement the price discrimination in Armenia and Azerbaijan, but it does not exert market power in the world wheat market.The main goal of this study is to examine: how does the effects of exchange rate fluctuations on price markups differ across wheat exporting countries – Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine? If KRU countries are able to exercise pricing to market behavior and get market power in international wheat market for the period 1996-2012? Which exporting country is expected to adjust prices to achieve foreign currency price stability in the destination markets? Pricing-to-market model will be used to check the existence of market power