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The purpose of this study is to present a conceptual overview of the price transmissions within agri‐food supply chains. Analyzing price transmission in agri‐food supply chains is essential since imperfect price transition may result in market power. This is an important issue that needs attention, given that the structure of agri‐food retail in Europe, USA and Canada is experiencing rapid change towards retail power.

The conceptual overview draws on a review of different approaches in analyzing transmission of prices through an agri‐food supply chain based on supply chain analysis and price transmission studies.

Three key challenges are identified in analyzing price transmission in agri‐food supply chains: structure of the supply chain; factors affecting price transmission; and supply response.

This paper presents a novel concept in analyzing price transmission in agri‐food supply chains using price transmission literature and bi‐directional flows of information and products in agri‐food supply chains

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the impact of the global food crisis of 2007–2008 on Tanzania’s real retail-food prices and on the cost of the typical food basket. The methodological approach is to compare real retail-food prices and food-basket costs in 20 regions of Tanzania with global food prices. The findings are that the global food crisis of 2007–2008 did not significantly cause food prices in Tanzania to increase and that domestic factors were more important drivers of food prices and food-basket costs. The social implication is that the impacts of the global food crisis on food prices and food-basket costs in developing countries may have been overestimated in previous research and the policy responses of the global community may have been inappropriate.

This paper attempts to understand how the interaction of natural disasters and human behaviour during wartime led to famines in three regions under imperial control around the Indian Ocean. The socio-economic structure of these regions had been increasingly differentiated over the period of imperial rule, with large proportions of their populations relying on agricultural labour for their subsistence.

Before the war, food crises in each of the regions had been met by the private importation of grain from national or overseas surplus regions: the grain had been made available through a range of systems, the most complex of which was the Bengal Famine Code in which the able-bodied had to work before receiving money to buy food in the market.

During the Second World War, the loss of control of normal sources of imported grain, the destruction of shipping in the Indian Ocean (by both sides) and the military demands on internal transport systems prevented the use of traditional famine responses when natural events affected grain supply in each of the regions. These circumstances drew the governments into attempts to control their own grain markets.

The food crises raised complex ethical and practical issues for the governments charged with their solution. The most significant of these was that the British Government could have attempted to ship wheat to Bengal but, having lost naval control of the Indian Ocean in 1942 and needing warships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean in 1943 chose to ignore the needs of the people of Bengal, focussing instead on winning the war.

In each of the regions governments allowed/encouraged the balkanisation of the grain supply – at times down to the sub-district level – which at times served to produce waste and corruption, and opened the way for black markets as various groups (inside and outside government ranks) manipulated the local supply.

People were affected in different ways by the changes brought about by the war: some benefitted if their role was important to the war-effort; others suffered. The effect of this was multiplied by the way each government ‘solved’ its financial problems by – in essence – printing money.

Because of the natural events of the period, there would have been food crises in these regions without World War II, but decisions made in the light of wartime exigencies and opportunities turned crises into famines, causing the loss of millions of lives.

This study examines the influence of the global geopolitical risk (GPR) on the relationship between oil prices and domestic food prices under the augmented Phillips curve framework.

Using monthly data on Nigeria from January 1995 to December 2021, the authors accommodate symmetry and asymmetry by adopting the linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag, linear and nonlinear Granger causality tests.

The study establishes the positive and significant effects of both oil prices and GPR on food prices in the long and short run, though with a small magnitude in the short run. The asymmetric model shows that, while oil price shocks (positive and negative) exert a positive influence on food prices in the long-run, the effects of oil price shocks differ when accounting for GPR in the short-run. The coefficients of the interactive term, being the moderator of GPR between oil-food prices, are positively significant across models, suggesting that they jointly influence food prices when assuming linearity. The nonlinear model shows that the positive and negative components of interactive terms exert a positively significant influence on food prices, even though food prices tend to be more reactive to positive oil price shocks. The robustness checks show a unidirectional causal flow from oil prices and GPR to food prices under the linear and nonlinear models.

The authors examine the moderating effect of the newly developed global GPR index of Caldara and Iacoviello (2022) on the oil–food inflation relationship in Nigeria by applying the symmetric and asymmetric approaches.

The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of rising food prices on food demand and nutrient intake among rural–urban migrants and whether such impact varies across income classes.

Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), this study adopts a quadratic almost ideal demand system (QUAIDS) for food demand elasticity and an indirect estimation method for nutrient elasticity to investigate the effects of rising food prices on food demand and nutrient intake among rural–urban migrants.

The estimated results indicate that an increase in the price of pork alone would lead to a larger reduction in most nutrients among rural–urban migrants than other single targeted food group, and a simultaneous rise in the price of all food groups would have a remarkably adverse effect on the nutritional status of rural–urban migrants in comparison to the nutritional effects of a rise in one targeted food group. In addition, the nutritional effects of food prices across income classes show that the nutritional status is particularly vulnerable to rising food prices among low-income rural–urban migrants.

This paper focuses on analyzing the impact of rising food prices on the nutritional status of rural–urban migrants, a topic that is very limited in the literature. This study provides a fresh look at the effect of volatile food prices on food demand and nutrient intake among rural–urban migrants. The results indicate that income growth would have a remarkable positive effect on nutrient intake for rural–urban migrants, especially for low-income rural–urban migrants. However, an increment in nutrients due to a growth in income would not be far from enough to cover the reduction in nutrients as a result of a simultaneous rise in price of all the studied food categories at the same rate.

This paper aims to investigate the changes in living standard among families with different socio-economic status in China with the use of Engel's Coefficient. The authors develop a decomposition methodology to figure out the driving forces behind changes in Engel's Coefficient, and investigate how dramatic economic growth, volatile food price and rapid nutrition transition affect living standard among different families.

The authors propose a statistical method to decompose the changes in living standard measured by Engel's Coefficient into structure effect, price effect, quantity effect and income effect. Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey data between 2000 and 2011, the authors estimate these four effects by employing a decomposition method.

Results show that Engel's Coefficient in China decreased by 8.7 percentage points (hereafter “pp”) during 2000–2011, where structure effect leads to 0.2 pp increase, price effect results in 17.7 pp increase, quantity effect brings about 12.4 pp decline and income effect contributes to 14.2 pp decline. Results indicate that rising food prices are the main obstacle to improve households' living standard. Typically, poor and rural families' living standard is more vulnerable to the rise in food prices, and they benefit less from income growth.

This study proposes a decomposition method to investigate the determinants of change in Engel's Coefficient, which provides a deeper understanding of how economic growth, food price change and nutrition transition affect people's living standard in different socio-economic groups in developing countries. This study also provides valuable insights on how to achieve common prosperity from the perspective of consumption upgrading.

The study's objective is to measure the response of the food prices to the aggregate and disaggregate geopolitical risk events, Russia's geopolitical risks and global energy prices in the context of two European regions, i.e. Eastern and Western Europe covering the monthly data from January 2001 to March 2022.

The authors apply a novel and sophisticated econometric method, the cross-quantilogram (CQ) approach, to analyse the authors’ monthly data properties. This method detects the causal relationship between the variables under the bi-variate modelling approach. More importantly, the CQ procedure divulges the bearish and bullish states of the causal association between the variables under short, medium and long memories.

The authors find that aggregate measures of geopolitical risk reduce food prices in the short term in the Eastern Europe but increases food prices in the Western Europe. Besides, the decomposed measures of geopolitical risk “threats” and “acts” have heterogeneous effects on the food prices. More importantly, Russia's geopolitical risk events and global energy prices enhance the food inflation under long memory.

The authors provide diverse policy implications for Eastern and Western Europe based on the authors’ findings. First, the European policymakers should take concrete and joint policy measures to tackle the detrimental effects of geopolitical risks to bring stability to the food markets. Second, this region should emphasize utilizing their unused agricultural lands to grow more crops to avoid external dependence on food. Third, the European Union and its partners should begin global initiatives to help smallholder farmers because of their contribution to the resilience of disadvantaged, predominantly rural communities. Fourth, geopolitically affected European countries like Ukraine should deal with a crippled supply chain to safeguard their production infrastructure. Fifth, fuel (oil) scarcity in the European region due to the Russia-Ukraine war should be mitigated by searching for alternative sources (countries) for smooth food transportation for trade. Finally, as Europe and its Allies impose new sanctions in response to the Russia-Ukraine war, it can have immediate and long-run disastrous consequences on the European and the global total food systems. In this case, all European blocks mandate cultivating stratagems to safeguard food security and evade a long-run cataclysm with multitudinous geopolitical magnitudes for European countries and the rest of the world.

This is the maiden study that considers the aggregated and disaggregated measures of the geopolitical risk events, Russia's geopolitical risks and global energy prices and delves into these dynamics' effects on food prices. Notably, linking the context of the Russia-Ukraine war is a significant value addition to the existing piece of food literature.

The purpose of this paper is to put forward a multi-period dynamic pricing strategy for perishable food considering consumers’ price fairness perception. The impacts of the multi-period retail price, food freshness and inventory shortage risk on consumers’ heterogeneous willingness to pay (WTP) and their strategic purchasing behaviours are studied.

The authors present a price optimization model for perishable food, and conduct a laboratory experiment to justify the theoretical model. The data collected are analysed by correlation analysis and nonparametric test.

The results obtained reveal, first, food freshness and inventory shortage risk have effect on consumers’ heterogeneous WTP. Second, different retail prices lead to consumers’ strategically purchasing behaviours. Finally, consumers’ intertemporal price fairness perception and the food retailer’s long-term utility maximization can be achieved by developing multi-period dynamic pricing strategy.

This study suggests the perishable food retailer to apply a step-by-step price markdown strategy. It aims at eliminating price unfairness perceptions caused by loss of freshness and high shortage risk of the perishable food in the subsequent selling periods within the shelf life. Some valuable managerial insights towards perishable pricing for food retailers are discussed.

This study serves as the first step to utilize a laboratory experiment to dig out consumers’ intertemporal WTP towards perishable food. It also presents a novel way for describing consumers’ intertemporal price fairness perception by equalizing consumers’ average utilities considering consumer surplus, food freshness and shortage risk at different selling periods. The line of research on dynamic pricing concerning consumers’ price fairness perception is quite new in academic research, and has arisen due to its importance for food retailers of maximizing their long-term revenues and also of constructing mutual benefit and lasting connections with the consumers.

The purpose of this study is to create an opportunity to see what is wrong with agriculture and provide an opportunity for much needed change. It identified who benefits or bears the pains of food prices increase, examines the causes and effects of the increase and discusses policy responses by various countries and the implications of such interventions.

Secondary data were employed and analyzed through simple descriptive statistics.

The results of the findings showed that increase in food prices affects the nutrition of not only the poor but also the working and middle classes. It limits the food consumption of the poor and worsens the dietary quality. It revealed that foods are available in many countries but millions of people have no purchasing power. Some of the driving forces of price increase include expansion of biofuels, high demand for food, and high cost of food production, climate change, unfavorable government policy and underinvestment in agricultural innovation. Contrary to the opinion that increased food prices benefit farmers, this study observed that the marketers benefit most. High costs of inputs and inflation make it difficult or impossible to produce by smallholder farmers.

The recent increase in food prices around the world has raised serious concerns about food and nutrition security of people. As part of intervention, several countries have banned grain exports and tariff reductions on imported foods in others. The export restrictions and import subsidies have harmful effects on import‐dependent trading partners and give wrong incentives to farmers by reducing their potential market size. The price controls employed by some countries reduce farmers' incentives to produce more food.

The purpose of this study paper is to focus on developing novel ways to monitor an economy in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic. A fully automated framework is proposed for collecting and analyzing online food prices in Poland. This is important, as the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe in 2020 has led many governments to impose lockdowns that have prevented manual price data collection from food outlets. The study primarily addresses whether food price inflation can be accurately measured during the pandemic using only a laptop and Internet connection, without needing to rely on official statistics.

The big data approach was adopted to track food price inflation in Poland. Using the web-scraping technique, daily price information about individual food and non-alcoholic beverage products sold in online stores was gathered.

Based on raw online data, reliable estimates of monthly and annual food inflation were provided about 30 days before final official indexes were published.

This is the first paper to focus on measuring inflation in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Monthly and annual food price inflation are estimated in real time and updated daily, thereby improving previous forecasting solutions with weekly or monthly indicators. Using daily frequency price data deepens understanding of price developments and enables more timely detection of inflation trends, both of which are useful for policymakers and market participants. This study also provides a review of crucial issues regarding inflation that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.