Market Structure Scenarios in International Steam Coal Trade

Johannes Truby and Moritz Paulus
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Johannes Trueby

The Energy Journal, 2012, vol. Volume 33, issue Number 3

Abstract: The seaborne steam coal market has changed in recent years; demand has grown fast, important players have emerged, and since 2007 prices have increased significantly and remained relatively high. In this paper, we analyze steam coal market equilibria in the years 2006 and 2008 by testing for two possible market structure scenarios: perfect competition and an oligopoly setup with major exporters competing in quantities. The assumed oligopoly scenario cannot explain market equilibria for any year. While we find that the competitive model simulates market equilibria well in 2006, the competitive model is yet not able to reproduce real market outcomes in 2008. The analysis shows that not all available supply capacity was utilized in 2008. We conclude that either unknown capacity bottlenecks or more sophisticated non-competitive strategies were the cause for the high prices in 2008.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=2487 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Market Structure Scenarios in International Steam Coal Trade (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aen:journl:33-3-04

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().