Retailer initiated food quality standards are important elements to market food and agricultural products. However, farmers' certification proceeds at an unequal speed worldwide with some countries representing a large number of certified producers and others representing very few, if any. This...

This paper examines the cost structure and cost efficiency for an unbalanced sample of 42 animal feed and 115 farm petroleum co-operatives in Canada over the period 1984-2001 using heterogeneous technology stochastic frontier models. The parameter estimates of the cost frontier and the resulting...