This study gives a theoretical explanation to why the slaughter cooperative Swedish Meats demutualized in 2007. The hypothesis is that the problems related to the vaguely defined property rights of the cooperative raised the members’ agency costs to an extent that these costs exceeded the...

Agriculture including food products is of particular interest for Ukraine. However, in free trade agreements involving the European Union, agriculture is always given special treatment and subject to less and slower liberalization than other sectors. This paper employs the standard Global Trade...

Quantitative partielle- oder allgemeine Gleichgewichtsmodelle stellen in der angewandten Ökonomie ein wichtiges Instrument zur Politikfolgenabschätzung dar. Aus wissenschaftlicher Sicht wird an diesen Modellen ihre mangelnde Transparenz sowie ihre Abhängigkeit von empirisch wenig gesicherten...

Economists use partial and general equilibrium trade simulation models to estimate the impact of changes in domestic policies and international trade rules. During the WTO Doha Development Agenda (DDA) negotiations economists have produced many different estimates of the gains that would result...

Applied general and partial equilibrium models are widely used tools for ex ante analysis of trade policy changes. However, simulation results seem to exhibit significant variation across publications, and the often criticised ‘black box’ character of applied trade models makes meaningful...

Recent empirical studies argue that the implementation of quality standards among agricultural exporters has the character of a fixed cost. However, this can be misleading if fixed costs are only understood in terms of required investments. Instead, we argue that standard adoption is the result...