Search results

This paper evaluates the feasibility and benefits of a local food distribution system, which connects farmers and restaurant owners from a logistics perspective. This paper considers a platform to improve operations and investigates various schemes for delivering locally produced food to restaurants using a food hub.

To compare distribution scenarios and derive managerial implications, a simulation model has been developed and executed in Matlab 2019a©. The model evaluates various settings of business connections between farmers and restaurateurs.

Results of computational experiments highlight great potentials of such a system, particularly to reduce travel distances. To obtain these positive externalities, the local system requires specific attention during the design of logistical aspects and needs to be planned following a specific structure.

The developed simulation model can be used to improve understanding of related short food supply chains by analyzing specific cases where the main actors involved differ in terms of type, number, and location.

The paper analyzes the feasibility and the effects of a new distribution system that can connect supply chain actors directly. The analyses focus on logistics aspects, a topic that is often neglected in sustainable consumption research. Furthermore, the paper does not focus of a single case study but develops a customizable model to be used in various settings.

The purpose is to market a reinterpretation of Brazilian economic history highlighting the importance of non-tradable goods to understand major historical developments such as the lack of industrialization in the mining boom; the rise and contribution of industries to development in the early 20th century; indexation as hyperinflation in the late 20th century; growth and cycles in the early 21st century.

Section 2 introduces analytical perspectives on the relationship between non-tradables, transport costs and external shocks. Section 3 presents a historical overview of the gold and coffee cycles in the Brazilian economy, which highlights the crucial role played by transport costs in the genesis of industrialization. Thus, in a more precise way, industrialization was not an import substitution process but the substitution of non-tradables by the domestic tradable manufactures.

Section 4 shows that Brazilian statistical records and historiography disregard this characterization and, to that extent, underestimate economic growth in the primary export phase (1872–1920) and overestimate growth rates in the industrialization period (1920–1940). Section 5 shifts to the end of the 20th century to analyze the relationship between non-tradables, indexation and hyperinflation. Section 6 concludes with a brief discussion of the role played by the terms of trade and non-tradables in the unfolding of the 2014 economic crisis.

Distance from international markets and a continental geographic size made transport costs in Brazil historically prohibitive: the relevance of non-tradables in the Brazilian economic history. While the theme is not new, it seldom received proper attention in the historiography.