Growing consumer interest in functional foods and nutraceuticals has been seen as a significant business opportunity for the agri-food sector. Many of the new firms in this sector are small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). These SMEs often face difficulties in obtaining financing for their...

Past agricultural input market participation studies have generally ignored the joint influence of income diversification, transaction cost and production risk on input market participation decisions. This study develops an analytical framework that jointly incorporates the three factors and...

Bioproducts are often presented as one of the potential saviours of Canadian agriculture, offering non-food applications for agricultural products. However, relatively little is known about the sector or the characteristics of the firms. This paper presents an analysis of the Canadian...

Advancement in biotechnology requires continued innovative activity by firms. To grow, biotechnology firms must understand the factors affecting their innovative activity. Such understanding also informs policy makers, and supports the development of policies promoting one's biotechnology...

Despite record global economic growth in past decade – malnutrition remains a serious problem in many parts of the world. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), about 800 million people (17% of the world’s population) remain malnourished. For these...

The impact of rising global food prices on consumer welfare is investigated. A quadratic AIDS model is estimated using data spanningcountries at various levels of economic development. Statistical comparison suggests the QUAIDS model is preferred over the non-linear AIDSmodel. Estimated...

The Doha Trade Round maintains that a considerable effort will be given to take into account better the particular needs of developing nations. Many low-income countries argue that the flexibility to invoke a special safeguard mechanism when faced with volatile commodity markets is a necessary...

Using the fact that separate markets exist for used and unused quota, this paper derives a formula to compute the marginal cost of the milk production using a competitive dynamic optimization model. It is showed that, under a perfect competitive quota market, the difference between unused quota...

This paper was presented at the INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN LIVESTOCK PRODUCTS SYMPOSIUM in Auckland, New Zealand, January 18-19, 2001. The Symposium was sponsored by: the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium, the Venture Trust, Massey University, New Zealand, and the Centre for...

Contributed Paper prepared for presentation at the International Association of Agricultural Economists Conference, Beijing, China, August 16-22, 2009