This paper examines structural breaks in the vertical price relationships in U.S. beef/cattle and pork/hog sectors using monthly data of the past 40 years. A major methodological issue addressed is how to estimate price relationships when data contain intermittent structural breaks with unknown...

Firms in the agri-food industry are embedded in a system of institutions, regulations and policies that shape their economic environment and affect their conduct and performance. Changes in this system can propose new challenges for the firms that need to adequately and efficiently change and...

In the centrally planned economy of the former Soviet Union, retail and wholesale trade were very much neglected. Since the beginning of transition the share of trade has increased considerably both in terms of its contribution to national product and employment. This paper analyses the...

The main objective of this paper is to analyse the structural changes in European Agri-food systems in the last 30 years in order to verify the presence of a convergence process towards a more homogeneous structure among EU countries. This analysis considers the relative importance of the main...

In the centrally planned economy of the former Soviet Union, retail and wholesale trade were very much neglected. Since the beginning of transition the share of trade has increased considerably both in terms of its contribution to national product and employment. This paper analyses the...

In processing industries, plant location decisions are costly and have consequences for firm profitability. When raw materials are heavy or perishable, transportation costs limit shipping distances and processors must compete locally for raw material inputs. To determine the likely profitability...

Conventional wisdom holds that a small and decreasing number of hog slaughter firms are using their "market power" to take advantage of U.S. hog producers. Existing studies have simply calculated industry concentration ratios and assumed/asserted that the performance of such a concentrated...

The challenge of implementing EU quality and safety standards for food production and trading is one of the driving forces behind the restructuring of the agrofood chains in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC). The progress made in the compliance process not only varies amongst sectors...

In an imperfectly competitive industry, differentiated products compete with each other with price rather than quantity as the strategic variable. Several previous studies have employed a generalized Nash Bertrand model: Liang (1989), Cotterill (1994), Cotterill, Putsis and Dhar (2000), and...

This paper documents the extent of cooperative penetration into branded dairy product markets and presents case study evidence on competitive strategies in the skim/low fat milk, whole milk, cottage cheese, butter, margarine, and ice cream markets. We employ data for 51 local market areas from...