Agribusiness最新文献

Seafood products are mainly provided through trade to international markets and Norway is the major international player for the export of salmon products. It is argued that fresh or chilled salmon, which are perishable products and Norway's main seafood export, need stable trade partners to safely and properly reach consumption markets. In this study, the firm-to-firm level trade transactional data for both exporters and importers for the 2005–2018 period was utilized for a trade duration analysis. The Kaplan–Meier survival estimators, Cox proportional hazard model, and frailty model were used to study the stability of trade relations between the partners through survival and hazard models. The study considers the heterogeneous firm trade model along with a theoretical framework. The results show that, on average, the trade duration for the salmon trade between firms is 2.39 years, which is relatively low for a perishable product such as salmon. It shows that the market entry and exit is relatively fast, and that the survival rate between the EU as a major demand market and non-EU countries is not very different. However, core and periphery markets can be defined by considering the survival rate, as major processing hubs in the EU, such as Poland and France as core markets, have higher survival rates compared with other countries that can be considered peripheries. Both extensive and intensive margins were found to reduce the hazard ratio. Different hazard ratios were also found between different types of exporter or ones utilizing different means of transport. We conclude that the trade duration between the partners can be increased if the competition in the market increases, which is probably possible in markets like the United States where other exporters such as Chile are available.

The Luenberger–Hicks–Moorsteen (LHM) total factor productivity (TFP) indicator has sound theoretical properties, but its decomposition yields indeterminate components of technical change and scale efficiency change that can become infeasible. The current paper decomposes the approximating Bennet indicator, which results in determinate components of technical change, technical efficiency change, scale efficiency change and mix efficiency change that are always feasible. The application focuses on the German dairy-processing sector, an important postfarm supply chain actor. We compute 558 growth rates for the period 2011–2020. The results show that the LHM-approximating Bennet indicator decreases by on average 1.14% p.a., with substantial annual fluctuations. The underlying components of output- and input-oriented technical change also fluctuate substantially, and often conflict. Moreover, output- and input-oriented TFP efficiency change fluctuate moderately on average, which is mainly driven by scale efficiency change and mix efficiency change. The components of technical efficiency change remain relatively stable on average. Indeterminateness is a relevant problem when decomposing the original LHM indicator for the current sample: depending on the specification, the proportion of infeasibilities when decomposing the original LHM indicator ranges between 6.09% and 15.95%. Our proposed determinate decomposition is thus a valuable complement. [EconLit Citations: D24, D25, Q13].

The European Union (EU) farm-to-fork strategy aims to empower consumers to make sustainable food choices, among others, through harmonizing voluntary green claims and labels and potentially introducing a common sustainable claims and labels framework for food products. The literature on the current use of sustainability claims and labels (SCLs) in the EU market is scarce. This paper analyzes the trend developments of SCLs in product launches by food companies across different product groups and countries. The analyses are based on Mintel Global New Product Database on newly introduced products with SCLs, covering 24 food product categories and 19 European countries over the 2005–2021 period. The results show that, on aggregate, across all covered countries and products, the share of product launches with SCLs increased by 2.83% annually from 2005 to 2021. This trend varies greatly among countries, product categories and SCL types. Further, the results show that products covering environmental only SCLs make the highest contribution to the overall sustainability trend (68.2%), followed by products with a combination of both environmental and social SCLs (27.5%), whereas only social SCLs have a minor representation (4.2%). [EconLit Citations: Q18, Q01].

In recent years concerns have been raised regarding the environmental consequences of over-use of nitrogen fertilizers on a global level. However, the balance between sustainability and agricultural productivity, a central concern for policy makers in developing countries, has not been sufficiently addressed. In this paper, I evaluate farmers’ fertilization practices and their effect on yield using unique plot level data from India. I estimate quadratic crop response functions for different crops and cropping systems. To address endogenous input choices, I use input prices and cost shifters from the fertilizer industry as instrumental variables for the fertilization practice. I find that a large share of Indian cultivators overuse nitrogen relative to the other two nutrients, and could benefit from simply reducing the amount of nitrogen used while keeping the other nutrients fixed. This suggests a potential win-win situation where both productivity and sustainability can be improved by changing fertilizer application. The widespread “nitrogen-only” fertilization pattern is rejected as optimal in most cases. [EconLit Citations: Q12, Q15, Q16, E23, C26, C14].