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Food markets are characterized by asymmetric information between suppliers and consumers, which causes inefficiency of market and food safety risks. This paper studies how the food quality and safety information disclosed by the government affects the hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) certification decision of meat producers. The heterogeneity of the effects across different regions, provinces with different meat output scales and provinces with different intensities of food safety regulation is evaluated.

This paper applies a unique database comprising information from multiple sources. Food quality and safety information disclosure is indicated by the number of failure records of food sampling inspections by the government in 2015–2018. Fixed-effect model is used in the analyses.

The results demonstrate that food quality and safety information disclosure has a significant effect on the HACCP certification adoption by meat producers. The effect is heterogeneous across geographic regions, i.e. this effect is larger in the east and the middle of China than that in the west and the northeast. The heterogeneity across regions may be caused by the variance in meat output scales and fiscal expenditures on food safety among provinces.

This research is one of the preliminary attempts to understand how producers respond in terms of HACCP certification to the amount of food quality and safety information disclosed by the government, based on the case of meat industry in China.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the effect of vegetable producers' inclusiveness in supply chain coordination on vegetable production performance and potential spillover effect on farm and non-farm income.

A comprehensive dataset comprised of 410 paired vegetable producers in China is applied. Propensity score matching (PSM) estimation method is used to control for the selection bias problem.

The empirical results indicate that contracting farming does not have significant effect on yield or profit of vegetable production, but promote producers to obtain quality certification. In comparison, cooperative membership has positive effects on the yield, profit and quality certification of producers. Additionally, cooperatives generate positive spillover effects on members' farm and non-farm income, though the results are sensitive to unobserved factors. The inclusion of spillover effects helps to find out the potential unobserved effects which are neglected by most studies and design better policies to promote the development of agricultural companies and farmer cooperatives.

First, empirical evidence is provided for theories regarding the roles of different supply chain coordination modes on producers. Second, the analysis on evaluating the effects of supply chain coordination also considers the spillover effect on the farming of other products and even non-farm work of involved producers. Third, a unique dataset comprised of 420 paired vegetable producers, based on an extensive survey is built.

The evolution of the Fair Trade movement offers an apposite case through which to examine the idea of regulating risk through a “social sphere.” An analysis of Fair Trade through the lens of “defiance” reveals discrete models and actors of risk regulation that evolve in an iterative fashion. These findings not only add complexity and heterogeneity to the social actors and mechanisms of regulation in the social sphere, but also highlight the challenges this diversity poses for the project of alleviating market risk. In turn, the framework of defiance offers a fertile analytical framework for the study of transnational risk regulation by capturing the dynamic actor and institutional complexities that underpin, and embody challenges for, the regulation of risk through the social sphere. The article begins with an overview of the Fair Trade movement and consideration of Fair Trade’s approach to regulating market risk. It then introduces the notion of defiance, focusing on two of its subtypes: game playing and resistance. Following a short overview of the methodological framework employed to analyze these dynamics, the third section applies these analytical categories of defiance to explore primary data gathered on Fair Trade’s evolution. The article shows that the motivational posture of game playing, through its continued experimentation and entrepreneurship in transnational risk regulation, is pregnant with potential to mitigate the risks generated by economic activity.

In this chapter it is shown that, in spite of the fundamental importance for economic growth of product innovation, standard economic theory – neo-classical as well as transaction cost approaches to industrial organization – tends to neglect it. It is also shown that moving the focus to product innovation leads to very different conclusions on how alternative institutional set-ups affect economic performance. Institutional set ups assumed to optimise allocation and minimise transaction costs do not support innovation and growth. That is why producer goods where innovation is a regular phenomenon are transacted neither in pure markets nor in hierarchies. The omnipresence of “organized markets” reflects the need for users as well as producers to engage in on-going information exchange and interactive learning in connection with product innovation.

We formally investigate the effects of an inspection system influencing safety of foreign and domestic food products in the domestic market. Consumers purchase domestic and imported food and value safety. Potential protectionism à la Fisher and Serra (2000) can arise: inspection frequency imposed on foreign producers set by a domestic social planner would be higher than the corresponding policy set by a global social planner treating all producers as domestic. The domestic social planner tends to impose most if not all of the inspection on foreign producers, which improves food safety for consumers and limits the production loss for domestic producers. Despite this protectionist component, inspections address a potential consumption externality such as health hazard in the domestic country when unsafe food can enter the country undetected. We then calibrate the analytical framework to the U.S. shrimp market incorporating key stylized facts of this market. Identifying protectionist inspection requires much information on inspection, safety, damages, and costs. We also investigate how to finance the inspection policy from a social planner perspective. Financing instruments differ between the domestic and international welfare-maximizing objectives.

This article suggests that both producers and analysts are strategic about categorization. Producers use categorization to maintain a balance of differentiation and legitimacy, whereas analysts seek to influence categorization and clarify boundaries. Ideas are explored for software producers and Gartner, the preeminent high-technology analyst. Findings show evidence of strategic categorization. Producers move to proximate market categories in response to competition. Gartner reports on large categories and those that receive investment and stops reporting on categories that have fuzzy boundaries. Compared to analysts, producers may be more influential in category creation than previous research has acknowledged.

The “first generation” (Lammers, 1978, p. 486) of comparative analysis of organizations in sociology (e.g., Blau, 1965; Stinchcombe, 1959) focused on the “nuts and bolts” of organizational structure as the key criterion with which to derive organizational typologies (Perrow, 1967; Pugh, Hickson, & Hinings, 1969). This initial cohort of analysts saw the intrinsic features – or “organizational attributes” (Blau, 1965, p. 326) – constitutive of the “technical core” of the organization, such as features related to the organization of the production process (Perrow, 1967) or the structure of allocation of discretion and authority (e.g., Etzioni, 1961), as the royal road to the development of a cogent approach to comparative analysis of organizations.

This chapter opens the second part of the Volume, focusing on the small farms' role and dynamics within the evolving food system. Assessing small farmers' actual and potential contribution to the change towards a sustainable food and nutrition security requires a deep understanding of their strategic decision-making processes. These processes take place in a context highly conditioned by internal and external conditions, including the complex relations between farm and household, which are mapped and described. Building on an adaptation of Porter's model (Porter, 1990), the chapter investigates how farmers, given those conditions, define their strategies (in particular their innovation strategies) aimed at economic and financial sustainability through a multidisciplinary analysis of scientific literature. Internal conditions are identified in the light of the Agricultural Household Model (Singh & Subramanian, 1986) which emphasizes how family farming strategies aim at combining business-related objectives, and family welfare. Then, a comprehensive set of external conditions is identified and then grouped within eight categories: ‘Factors’, ‘Demand’, ‘Finance and Risk’, ‘Regulation and Policy’, ‘Technological’, ‘Ecological’, ‘Socio-institutional’ and ‘Socio-demographic’. Similarly, six types of strategies are identified: ‘Agro-industrial competitiveness’, ‘Blurring farm borders’, ‘Rural development’, ‘Risk management’, ‘Political support’ and ‘Coping with farming decline’.

Developing new markets for small producers has been a major focus of research and development in many parts of the world. Too frequently, the ways in which existing production and market systems constrain producer possibilities has been ignored. This study examines how existing systems have affected coffee farmers in Costa Rica and Panama as they attempt to enter the elite coffee market, which promises higher prices for premium production. In the past 50 years, Costa Rica had created a system quite favorable to small producers in the world coffee market, while Panama had done little. Yet today, the Costa Rican system has proven to be a barrier to entering the highest levels of the coffee market, while the Panamanian system has produced coffees that are currently among the best in the world. The shifting ways in which production and marketing systems connect with world markets and elite taste suggest the necessity of greater sensitivity to how existing systems affect what farmers can and will decide to do.

A study of the price discounts granted by Morton Salt Company and other producers of table salt in the U.S. on their sales of table salt to grocery wholesalers and retailers. The discounts were found to be illegal under the Robinson-Patman Act by the Federal Trade Commission and the Supreme Court. The Commission and the Court believed that the discounts were unjustified price concessions granted to “large” buyers, consistent with the concerns of the Robinson-Patman Act. However, the evidence indicates that the most common discount – the “carload discount” – was received by virtually all buyers, regardless of the buyer’s size; the other discounts – “annual volume” discounts – though received primarily by “large” buyers, were likely cost based. The history of the discounts and likely reasons why they were granted are explored in detail.