Small-scale (communal) farmers in South Africa have limited access to factors of production, credit and information, and markets are often constrained by inadequate property rights and high transaction costs. The objective of this research is to investigate whether agricultural cooperatives -...

The food system is undergoing significant structural change at local, national, and international levels. As the food system evolves, some segments along the chain between producers and consumers are disappearing. Others are being transformed. Supply chain concepts are useful for identifying and...

Empirically based management practice indices are constructed using results from factor analysis of data from 344 stores in the 2000 Supermarket Panel. These indices are compared to six management indices based on expert opinion. The empirical indices group variables differently and provide a...

The Life Cycle - Permanent Income Hypotheses (LCPIH) suggests that the timing of an income payment or government transfer should have no effect on the expenditures of the recipient. In this paper we test the LCPIH against a dynamic model of household consumption which predicts clustered food...

Data from the 2002 Supermarket Panel are used to estimate a supermarket production function with weekly gross margin as the output measure and store selling area and total labor hours as variable inputs. The model also includes productivity shifters describing format and service offerings, store...

The 2000 Supermarket Panel gathered data on store characteristics, management practices, and operating performance from a representative, nation-wide sample of supermarkets. The Panel is unique because the unit of analysis is the individual store, and the same stores will be surveyed over time....

Information and internet-based technologies have fostered new supply chain initiatives in food retailing but little research has evaluated productivity impacts. A ray-homothetic production function is estimated for supermarkets to investigate the productivity effects of key variables such as...