A changing world of increasing complexity, fluctuating prices, high energy costs and limited data necessitate creative blending of economic theory and available empirical statistics to understand the welfare impacts in a specific market. In this paper, a programming approach is used in tandem...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

The purpose of this study is to assess the potential of clustering in the development of agriculture and rural communities in China. We shall examine in detail the food industry, which is the link in the food chain that propels the industrialization of agriculture, and identify instances of...

Increasing grain price volatility over the last year has revived the discussion on optimal marketing strategies. Various models of optimal grain marketing have been proposed and simulated in the literature. In this study an overview on these models is presented and critical aspects are...

China has embarked on a major program to modernise agricultural and agribusiness structures with far reaching implications for rural development, international competitiveness / trade and food safety. There are, however, few studies that examine in detail how the modernisation program has...

The typical model of retail pricing for produce products assumes retailers set price equal to the farm price plus a certain markup. However, observations from scanner data indicate a large degree of price dispersion in the grocery retailing market. In addition to markup pricing behavior, we...

The objective of this study is, based on the existing literature, to provide a general systematic characteristic of market structure models. We distinguish cost, production, profit, revenue functions, as well as the general identification approach as most plausible methods to measure the degree...

Origin matters. This has been shown by numerous studies using either discrete choice or hedonic approaches to derive implicit prices for origin as a product attribute. In most of the hedonic studies, intercept dummies were introduced for specific regional origins and statistically significant...

Price dispersion, i.e. a homogeneous product being sold at different prices by different sellers, is among the most replicated findings in empirical economics. The paper assesses the extent and determinants of spatial price dispersion for 14 perfectly homogeneous food products in more than 400...