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Abstract
This paper analysed the market integration between international and domestic market of
rice covering the period of agricultural trade liberalization in Bangladesh. Policy makers are
interested to know whether price changes in the world market are transmitted to the
domestic market when there are some non-trade factors other than the trade liberalization
that might affect the rice markets to be integrated. We used a threshold cointegration and
threshold vector error correction model (TVECM) of Hansen and Seo (2002) to account for
the affects of transaction cost (which is very substantial in the case of the developing
countries) in the market integration. We found from Supremum Lagrange Multiplier
(SupLM) test that Bangladesh rice market is partially integrated with the counterpart
`world market`. Only one-third of the world price changes are got transmitted to domestic
market. We also have found that the presence of the transaction cost affects in the rice
market integration. So, it is clear that trade liberalization bring its expected outcomes for
markets to be integrated but liberalization alone is not enough to explore the maximum
benefit, there are some other factors such as non-tariff barriers and trade facilitations that
should be seriously taken into consideration by the policy makers.