Rising consumer interest for ethical and/or responsible products and the growing interweaving of social and environmental issues question the ability of scientific methods to correctly assess social impacts. To this day however, no consensus has yet been reached on relevant indicators to assess...

Sustainability standards are flooding global agricultural markets. Standards however, are not recent: standards for the exchange of grain and tropical products emerged in the 19th century. The objective of this article is to analyze, in a historical perspective, the implications of the...

In the fresh produce long distance international trade, market intermediaries are still a key actor while modern retailers have little backward integrated into the import activity. Difficulty to negotiate a price at the FOB level, three or four weeks before fresh produce are consumed, leads...

Purpose: French wine cooperatives show differences of corporate objectives, but also common ones with private wine merchants, as they face a common economic environment. The traditional controlling and financial models do not seem adequate to measure ‘sustainable social economy’ performances...

The document summarises the results of twenty years of coordination of research programmes on urban food supply in Africa and Asia in collaboration with national researchers. The main research questions are the following ones: What is the role of geographical and relational proximity in the...

The impact of food safety standards on international trade has already been addressed. Generally, economists try to assess trade losses borne by exporters when importing countries impose stricter regulations. In this paper we assess the impact of the Maximum Residue Levels (MRL) of pesticides on...

The prevalence of food quality standards in international trade is constantly increasing and has a growing influence on developing countries. A wide range of literature in development economics focused on the determinants of the standard adoption and on the debate of whether international...

As the information relative to endowments, costs and preferences is dispersed among many agents, the quality of resource allocation depends on the ability of markets to communicate information inside the economic system. Because information is transferred through negotiation and transaction...