The grain handling sector in Canada and the United States is vital to agriculture and trade. In a typical year on the Canadian prairies, about 140,000 producers deliver some 20 to 30 mmt of grain for export to primary elevators. In the United States, about 2.1 million producers deliver about 300...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/11/06.

One of the last major undertakings of Justice Willard Z. Estey was a comprehensive review of the grain handling and transportation system in Western Canada, undertaken for the federal government. Commissioned in December 1997, it was completed in two phases – May and December 1998....

Much of the post‐September 11, 2001, rhetoric has focussed on the idea that the terrorist attacks in the USA catapulted the world airline industry into a financial crisis. But are the current problems in the world airline industry so readily attributable to the events of September 11? Was the...

We use the theory of generalised additive models to develop a non-parametric cost function for the Canadian cable television industry through the 1990s. We offer that statistical testing for substitutability/complementarity of inputs is important for regulators and policymakers since some forms...

This paper examines and compares the technical efficiency measures of Ontario and New York dairy producers for the period 1992 to 1998. A nonparametric stochastic frontier model is introduced to estimate technical efficiency. The backfitting algorithm of Breiman and Friedman is used to estimate...

The use of complementary inputs is a key characteristic of the production process in many food related industries. In this article we explore how market power in a complementary input sector compares to the exertion of market power in a downstream sector for both producer and consumer welfare,...

With worldwide food security emerging as a major policy issue moving forward, the structure and optimization of key agricultural supply chains is of growing importance. In turn, while many working models of supply chain optimization have been developed to ensure analytic tractability, others are...