Asymmetry in Price Transmission: Evidence from the Wheat-Flour Supply Chain in Russia

Price volatility has serious implications for economic welfare of various agents in the grain supply chain. The paper examines asymmetric price transmission along the wheat producer-processor supply chain in Russia using log-transformed monthly prices during the period of 2000-2019. Having specified linear asymmetric vector error correction model, we exposed the long-term cumulative asymmetry in price transmission, however, the hypothesis of short-term symmetry presence failed to reject. The analysis revealed dominant position for wheat producers and wholesalers over the wheat processors. Imperfect competition and their resulting market power, as well as the existence of a huge number of illegal processors are the main causes for asymmetric price transmission on the Russian wheat market.

Asymmetric price transmission and farmers' response in the Czech dairy chain

The standard economic price theory of working with efficient source allocation is being confronted with a series of empirical findings of asymmetric price responses. The objective of the research was to examine whether the distribution of prices within the dairy chain in the Czech Republic was fair and whether farmers progressed in a collective approach to strengthen their position in the supply chain. We used the pre-cointegration and cointegration approach to test for asymmetry in the transmission of farm milk prices throughout the supply chain. Furthermore, we measured the development of market concentration by means of the Herfindahl-Hirschman index and discussed the background of the figures with producer organisation representatives. The results proved there were asymmetric price transmissions. In response, farmers consolidated and concentrated their milk sales. The concentration should not yet be understood as a goal but as a means to the next steps.

The Short- and Long-Term Costs of a Severe Drought on Retail Peanut Butter Prices and Consumers

This article investigates the short- and long-term costs of an extreme weather event on retail food prices and consumer expenditures. We utilize the 2011 severe peanut drought as a quasi-natural experiment and find that retail peanut butter prices increased 21.3% as a result of the drought-driven shock in farm peanut production and prices. Moreover, we identify long-term costs due to positive asymmetric price transmission as retail peanut butter prices returned to pre-shock levels much more slowly and remained on average 6.2% higher for 4 years after farm peanut prices returned to pre-shock levels. For consumers, the drought increased peanut butter costs, and the persistence of higher prices in peanut butter led to long-term consumer costs. Peanut butter expenditure on average increased by 4.8% post-shock, with lower-income households increasing expenditures even more. A simple calculation estimates that higher peanut butter prices inflicted a cost of $1.08 billion during the shock, and sticky post-shock peanut butter prices imposed a cost of $628 million to U.S. consumers.

Asymmetric price transmission in the distribution channels of pork: Focusing on the effect of policy regulation of Sunday sales by hypermarkets in Korea.

In this paper, we investigate whether there exists market inefficiency in the distribution channel of pork by estimating a developed partial adjustment model that captures the asymmetric price transmission from wholesale to retail prices. The estimation results show that market efficiency exists for the wholesale and two types of retail markets in the distributional channel of pork in Korea. The government's regulation on Sunday sales by hypermarkets plays a significant role in increasing market efficiency, forcing more competition among hypermarkets, and changing the structure of asymmetric price transmission from wholesale to traditional market prices. The results suggest that the policy goal has been achieved in the traditional market by leading to a more efficient price forming due to a lessened degree of asymmetric price transmission from the wholesale price. Although market inefficiency has been maintained in the distribution channel between wholesale market and hypermarket, the behavior of price setting by hypermarkets has not been influenced by the policy.