Around $100 million has been spent annually on R&D and promotion in the Australian red meat industries in recent years. The R&D investments are made throughout the production, processing and marketing chain in both the grass and grain finished sectors. Promotion investments are made in both...

Our objective in this paper is to review the origins and main points of theories of firm behaviour used in economic theory and strategic management, with particular reference to the food marketing chain. We argue that while neoclassical economics may provide a robust framework in which to...

The Northern Tablelands region of New South Wales covers an area of approximately 3.12 million hectares including 2.11 million hectares occupied by some 2300 agricultural establishments producing agricultural commodities valued at more than $220 million. Sheep and wool production and cattle...

Recent empirical studies have found significant evidence of departures from competition in the input side of the Australian bread, breakfast cereal and margarine end-product markets. For example, Griffith (2000) found that firms in some parts of the processing and marketing sector exerted market...

This paper is a summary of some of the considerations involved in applying an existing model to a new problem, in particular in deciding whether to update or not, and some of the issues involved in interpreting the output from the new application. Thus where you start from does influence where...

Scope economies can be used in studies of farming systems to provide a measure of synergies between different farm enterprises and between activities within farm enterprises. In this paper, they are reported for farms in three benchmarking groups in Australia by estimating stochastic input...

This paper examines what, precisely, is meant by a 'farm', the criteria for the inclusion of individual farms in a statistical register and the resulting enumerations and average sizes of farms in published statistics. Alternative measures of farm size are examined and a relatively novel measure...