When food prices shoot over import parity, this often leads to social and political unrest and even the toppling of governments. If markets behaved efficiently and in the absence of trade barriers, food prices should not exceed the price in world markets plus the cost of importing it to domestic...

Over the last 20 years, consumers have spent a declining portion of their income on food for consumption at home, while the share of income spent on meals purchased at restaurants, cafeterias, and fast-food chains has held constant This article attempts to explain this phenomenon by estimating a...

The current situation and prospects for coffee are of widespread interest to American consumers and to those who supply them, and it is of vital interest to the many Latin American countries that depend on coffee as a primary source of foreign exchange earnings. The smaller per capita use of...

Measures of productivity, for agriculture as well as for the private sector of the economy as a whole, have a long and fruitful history in helping to interpret movements in output, prices, and factor costs. To an economist who is familiar with productivity research, and who has watched the...

For a half-century the parity ratio has served as the most commonly used measure of the effects of relative price changes on the farm economy The authors present a consistent economic model which measures the price-related income effects of relative price changes in selected sectors of the U.S....

Rapid urbanization in Zambia means that increasingly heavy demands are being placed on urban food marketing systems. Investment in these systems has been woefully inadequate for many decades, creating supply bottlenecks and health hazards that work against the interests of both farmers and...

This study applies the logic of queuing thcory to the availability of hospital services in a ruraloriented. multicounty planning district in northwestern lower Michigan. The seven hospitals in the area had 611 beds and provided services for 489 patient-days in 1 year. The study found that the...

The statistical measures used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture since 1995 to monitor the food security of the Nation’s households—the extent to which they can consistently acquire adequate food for active healthy living—are based on a single-parameter logistic latent-trait measurement...