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Food and beverage (F&B) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) must diversify their markets and obtain predictable sources of revenues to withstand difficult and volatile periods such as the post-pandemic geopolitical scenario, recently burdened by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. On the other hand, another strand of the literature suggests that public procurement could be considered a great source of income, enabling solid contracts, revenues and cash-flow stability. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the role of public procurement, the adoption of e-commerce platforms and their interactions in affecting the exporting performances of SMEs operating in the F&B sector.

The study retrieves data from 2,186 Italian F&B manufacturing SMEs relying on Margò by Cribis database. Therefore, it conducts a structured equational model (SEM) to test the developed hypotheses empirically.

The findings reveal that digital selling platforms positively affect exports, whereas public procurement negatively affects F&B SMEs exports. Nonetheless, findings underline that the interaction between public procurement and the adoption of digital selling platforms dampens public procurement's negative effects on exports.

This study brings an original contribution to the F&B literature by conducting empirical research on an extensive sample of firms from one of the most influential countries in the F&B vertical, Italy, with officially registered data. More importantly, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study pioneers the investigation of the relationship between public procurement and e-commerce platforms in affecting F&B SMEs' export performances.

Given the dominant share of India in global production of fruits and vegetables, this paper intends to analyze the export competitiveness of India and other major food exporters in the world trade. The purpose of this study is to examine export structure, substitutability and complementarity of selected fresh and processed fruits and vegetables of top ten food exporters for the period 2010-20.

Balassa’s (1965) revealed comparative advantage (RCA) index was used to measure RCA indices of selected fruits and vegetables under study. Also, revealed symmetric comparative advantage (RSCA) and normalized RCA (NRCA) indices have been calculated. Further, Spearman rank correlation coefficients were computed to analyze changes over the study period for India and other competing countries. The export data have been sourced from UN Comtrade, an electronic database of United Nations, as well as World Trade Statistical Review, a database of World Trade Organization. The analysis was undertaken at Harmonized System (HS) four-digit classification for the period 2010-20.

The results disclosed an improvement in India’s comparative advantage over the period of 2010-20 in HS 07 product category, whereas the advantage ceded to other competitive nations in HS 08 product category. Further, Spearman rank correlation coefficients revealed that India faces competition from countries like China, Indonesia, Brazil, Thailand, Argentina and European Union for HS 07 product category, while countries like Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil and Thailandare the major competitors of India in HS 08 product category.

The paper expands the existing agricultural trade literature in three ways. First, it is one of the very few studies that have analyzed RCA for Indian fresh and processed fruits and vegetables using three different types of indices, namely, Balassa’s RCA, RSCA and NRCA. Second, the authors provide a number of comparisons related to RCA for Indian fruits and vegetables with other top food exporters in the world for a period of 10 years (2010-20). Third, the authors contribute to agricultural trade literature by assessing the substitutability or complementarity of India in the export of fruits and vegetables with other competing nations by using Spearman rank correlation coefficients.

This study deals with changes in European Union's (EU's) trade potential in Machinery (HS 84–85) and Transportation (HS86-89) products.

The study uses a Structural Gravity model, Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimation together with panel data for the years 2002–2018 and a two-step procedure that employs predicted values of bilateral trade to compare potential to actual trade.

Results for Machinery products suggest a potential to expand trade with existing Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) in the American continent, and countries of the IGAD region in Africa. In Transportation, a high trade potential with RTAs is found in the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. Policy suggestions concentrate on opportunities for enhancing trade relations through trade liberalization and agreement proliferation.

There are no studies to date, that examine “collective” measure of EU trade potential, that treats the EU as a single country. Changes in existing opportunities to expand trade, common for EU members, are of special interest for policy formulation, especially after the recent turmoil presented by the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Greek Economic Crisis (GEC). Treating the EU as a single entity, is necessary for the formulation of an effective, common, EU trade policy. This study concentrates on the manufacturing sector to examine existing opportunities for the EU to expand trade, after the GFC and the GEC. This article deals with Machinery (HS 84 and 85) and Transportation (HS 86 through 89) products as they comprise a significant part of total EU exports, reaching 41% of total exports in 2016. Finally, this study offers a unique illustration of results through trade potential heat maps.

This paper investigates the effects of the total abolition of all forms of agricultural subsidies to producers and border tariffs on the prices of staple cereals.

The authors use the GTAP global economy-wide model and focus on 27 countries and 8 regions. The GTAP database that is used contains information on budgetary transfers to producers and market price support such as domestic price support, tariffs, export subsidies, quotas on exports or imports and other border measures.

The removal of subsidies is estimated to significantly increase the prices of wheat and other cereal grains in Japan, paddy rice in Malaysia and Indonesia, processed rice in Malaysia and Indonesia and wheat in Brazil and India. When border tariffs are removed, cereal prices are projected to fall in several countries, but the decline is more pronounced for wheat in Kenya and Japan, other cereal grains in South Korea and all staples in Nepal.

The alternative scenarios on the removal of agricultural subsidies in all agricultural sectors and the elimination of border tariffs are purely speculative as the analysis ignores important political economy considerations of agricultural and food policy reforms.

The findings from this study point to the importance of implementing additional policy measures to mitigate the possible negative effect of repurposing the support to agriculture and ensure the food security and welfare of those categories of buyers who heavily depend on the price of staple food for their livelihoods.

This study’s findings confirm that the elimination of agricultural subsidies would impact global food security directly by making staple food less affordable to the poorest and indirectly by decreasing the available household budget for other presumably more nutritious food groups. Consequently, it is expected that these price increases could make segments of the world population poorer, particularly the net-food buyers due to a decline in their real income.

The authors assess the impact of removing the subsidies on the economy in a comprehensive way, particularly given the recent policy focus on net zero emissions and Sustainable Development Goals that include healthy foods. The authors also consider the counter effects of tariff reduction on this, which is price-reducing.

This paper aims to quantify the loss (or leakage) of organic cattle to conventional value chains in Ireland and assess its economic and environmental impacts.

The paper adopts a Bio-economy Input-Output (BIO) model, a quantitative economic model representing the interdependencies between different sectors of the economy, to assess the economic and environmental impacts of organic leakage in the Irish beef sector.

The study reveals that 17% of organic cattle aged under 1 year old leave the organic value chain, leaking to the conventional market as a result of imbalances in the development of the beef value chain. The economic cost of this organic leakage is 5.66 million euros. Leakage also has environmental effects because of changes in lifecycle methane and nitrogen emissions based on longer finishing times on organic farms and chemical fertilisers applied on conventional farms. The organic leakage results in a reduction of 82 tons of methane emission and 52 additional tons of nitrogen emission, which leads to 11,484 tons of net global warming potential (GWP) for a 100-year time horizon.

Because of data availability, the research focussed on the baseline year 2015, which had national data available for disaggregation in Ireland. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to assess the economic and environmental impacts when more recent data are available and to analyse the change in the impacts over the years.

This study contributes to the discussion on organic conversion and provides valuable insights for stakeholders, especially policymakers, for the design of future organic schemes.

This is the first paper to assess organic leakage in the beef sector.

Circular economy advocates innovations that upcycle wastes in the food supply chain to generate high added-value materials. These innovations are not only disruptive and green but also they are often initiated by startups, leading to the emergence of novel open-loop supply chains connecting actors in food and non-food sectors. While earlier research has highlighted the need to seek legitimacy for disruptive innovations to survive and grow, little is known about how these innovations occur and evolve across sectors. This paper aims to elaborate on this mechanism by exploring the function of the circular economy as a boundary object to facilitate legitimacy-seeking strategies.

An exploratory multiple-case research design is adopted and features food waste innovation projects with multi-tier supply chains consisting of a food producer, a startup and a buying firm. The study is investigated from the legitimacy and boundary object lenses.

The findings proposed a framework for the role of a boundary object in enabling legitimacy-seeking strategies for novel food waste innovations. First, the interpretative flexibility of the circular economy affords actors symbolic resources to conduct manipulation strategy to achieve cognitive legitimacy. Second, small-scale work arrangements enable creation strategy for the new supply chain to harness moral legitimacy. Finally, pragmatic legitimacy is granted via diffusion strategy enabled by scalable work arrangements.

This paper provides novel insights into the emergence of food waste innovation from a multi-tier supply chain perspective. It also highlights the key role of the boundary object in the legitimacy-seeking process.

Polish agriculture is one of the main sectors of the national economy that, under the influence of political transformations and European integration, is subject to measures stimulating its development. The instruments of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) have been an important supporting stimulus.

This chapter aims to evaluate the significance of the common agricultural policy to the growth and development of agriculture and to structural transformations therein triggered primarily by the influx of additional CAP funds.

The agricultural sector was examined together with its selected characteristics in the context of CAP instruments' impact after 2004. Data included the streams of funding for Polish agriculture and indicators illustrating changes in structural features, economic performance and productivity of production factors. The indicators included changes in the number, structure and potential of farmsteads, changes in the level of employment in agriculture, this sector's share in total gross value added, profitability of farmsteads, capital expenditure level and changes in labour and land profitability compared with changes in the level of employment and agricultural production intensity. They were calculated based on data from EUROSTAT, Statistics Poland and Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN).

The outcomes confirm that common agricultural policy has contributed to create development processes in Polish agriculture. Changes in the sector affected structural characteristics, production factors productivity and the income of agricultural producers. Since Poland joined the European Union (EU), the percentage of agricultural workers declined by 8.4 p.p. and the number of farms decreased by nearly 30%. These changes were accompanied by a nearly twofold increase in agricultural labour productivity, 50% increase in land productivity and the profitability of land increased by 43%.

The aim of this study is to identify the way in which research on new business models in agri-food sector has been developed, in order to identify the main lines of work followed and determine a future research agenda in this field.

A systematic review of the literature is carried out, by applying the PRISMA method to identify and classify the main articles published on agri-food business models in journals included in the Web of Science Core Collection database.

The systematic literature review has identified three main forms of business models in the agri-food sector: sustainable business models, technology-based business models and cooperative business models. The three types of new business models are complementary and can sometimes be adopted together. The identification of these types of business models and the variants included in each of them is a valid starting point for new developments in this field.

The limitations of this study are those typical of any literature review and derived from the methodology used. The establishment of criteria relating to time, language, type of publication or database chosen means that this review may have left out relevant studies in this field of research. It is therefore recommended that new reviews be carried out with different criteria in the coming years in order to supplement the results obtained in this study.

Some research gaps were identified that should be further explored in the future. First, the relationship between digitisation and technological innovation in agri-food business models and the level of implementation of sustainable objectives in these business models has not been researched thoroughly. In addition, and despite the fact that the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has boosted innovation in agri-food business models, the authors have detected a lack of papers focused on solving problems arising from the shortage of raw materials or labour, possible energy crises or external dependence on local markets when it comes to meeting demand. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the limitations of international markets, mainly the European market, when it comes to dealing with problems arising from this type of crisis.