Harry M. Kaiser Libros

Now in its fifth edition, this book reviews and adapts microeconomic principles to the characteristics of agricultural commodity markets and then apply these principles to the various dimensions of price behavior.

Mandated agricultural commodity promotion programs - such as «Got Milk» - are highly visible, economically important, and controversial. In recent years, these programs have spent more than $1 billion on generic commodity promotion. They are authorized by producer referenda and funded using mandatory commodity taxes on producers and/or handlers. These programs have been the subject of much dispute and litigation, especially in California, which is home to a large number of them. This book takes a comprehensive look at the economic consequences and the resulting legal implications of commodity promotion programs in California, and distills the key consequences for similar programs on a national scale.

The new empirical industrial organization (NEIO) is a pioneering framework developed by economists to measure the degree of competitiveness of economic sectors. The primary contribution of NEIO is the generalization of perfect-competition and monopoly models to intermediate imperfect-competition models that can be empirically estimated. This framework has been applied to many sectors to provide policymakers dealing with antitrust issues with empirical evidence of market power throughout the marketing channel. This is the first book to provide a detailed, systematic overview of NEIO. The authors present a comprehensive synopsis of the theory and application of NEIO as well as selected case studies to the food sector.