The goal of this paper is to systematically review the literature on United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecast evaluation and critically assess their methods and findings. The fundamental characteristics of optimal forecasts are bias, accuracy and efficiency as well as encompassing and informativeness. This review revealed that the findings of these studies can be very different based on the forecasts examined, commodity, sample period, and methodology. Some forecasts performed very well, while others were not very reliable, resulting in forecast specific optimality record. We discuss methodological and empirical contributions of these studies as well as their shortcomings and potential opportunities for future work.

This article provides aggregate data on credit flows in Santafé de Bogotá, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Colombia, Ecuador and western Venezuela). By perusing a thorough report submitted to Bourbon authorities on notarial transactions, which included both ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical loans in the city, the article estimates the volume and size of lending activity while exploring how distinct types of credit interacted and shaped the business milieu of the region. It argues that by the late 1770s, Catholic Church lending had ceased to be the main source of investable funds in the region, with merchants and other non-ecclesiastical investors injecting growing funds into sectors traditionally avoided by ecclesiastical lenders such as commerce, mining and manufacturing. Network analysis suggests that merchants became brokers between different credit sources, alleviating information asymmetries and opening the credit market to borrowers with collateral and institutional restrictions willing to pay higher interest rates. Finally, by focusing on New Granada, the largest gold producer of the Spanish Empire, the article identifies some distinctive credit patterns that are different from those developed in silver-driven economies such as New Spain and Peru. Thus, the article provides new paths to study Latin American financial history.

Using newly released public data on beer prices in the state of California, we construct a large dataset (approximately 2 million observations) that includes beer prices and packaging configurations. We merge this dataset with brewery attributes and county demographics to explore pricing differentials across California, the U.S.’s largest brewing state. We provide evidence of potential pricing-to-market conducted by macro breweries across the three-tier distribution system where craft breweries do not. In addition, we describe package attributes that exhibit price differentials across brewery types. We make the cleaned data available to the public and provide avenues for future research that may be addressed with this new data.

The article addresses how merchants and wine producers interacted while oscillating between competition and collaboration in their internal relations. Spanning a period of more than a century, it addresses three chronological periods: 1900–1940, 1940–1994, and 1994 to the present. In the first, producers were able to forge a common front against the merchants in the shape of the Koöperatieve Wynbouwers Vereniging van Suid-Afrika, which was granted devolved regulatory powers over distilling wine in 1924 and then all wine in 1940. In the second, the antagonism between good and distilling producers was sublimated at a time of relative prosperity, while the merchants engaged in fierce competition. In the final phase, the regulatory system imploded while the export market re-emerged. Quality producers found common ground in appealing to terroir, whereas marginal producers supplied merchants and supermarkets with low-priced bulk wines.

Adam Smith saw the division of labour and specialisation as the driver of ‘universal opulence’, a process limited by the scope of the market. He also believed that competition was essential to ensure growth benefited the public. Yet eventually there could be a trade-off between these two mechanisms. In today’s era of global production networks, the markets at certain links in supply chains may support just one specialised supplier; and in winner-take-all digital markets there is a single supplier even at global scale. When the scope of the market is global, there may be a trade-off between specialisation and competition.

With economic reform, in China, labour turnover of seafarers became more possible. However, little attention has been paid to its consequences. A limited literature indicates that Chinese seafarers may leave state-owned enterprises to become freelance seafarers, working in the global labour market for better wages and employment conditions. There have been predictions of a substantial increase in seafarer export, with China becoming the top labour supplier to the global maritime industry. However, such expectations have been largely unmet. Through 157 qualitative interviews with seafarers and managers in Chinese ship crewing agencies, we explore some reasons why this may be so. The findings suggest that Chinese seafarers are in fact limited in their willingness and ability to leave their companies. This is due to a complex mixture of organisational, regulatory, infrastructural and personal contexts that are their everyday experience of work in China. Analysis further suggests that the underdevelopment of a national regulatory infrastructure and welfare support mechanism for seafarers, along with poor implementation of the Maritime Labour Convention 2006, combine to limit the extent of the reform of the Chinese seafaring labour market. Together, these factors help to explain why China’s seafaring labour export has been far lower than anticipated.

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.

In the past 50 years, South America has emerged as the dominant world producer of soybeans, a crop of no significance in the region before the middle of the 20th century. As of the crop year 2019/2020, Brazil and Argentina produced 176 million tons which is over half of all world production and these two countries alone will also account for 57 per cent of all Soybeans exported in international trade. How this new agricultural product evolved in these two principal regional producers is the aim of this study. Here we attempt to examine the historical evolution of soybean production in Brazil and Argentina and try to show the unique patterns of production in each of the two crucial states.

Despite its importance as a financial centre, the historical literature dedicated to the Swiss financial industry remains scarce. Analyses focusing on cantons and cities of the country are even more limited in number. This is unfortunate and is, in all likelihood, linked to the reluctance of financial institutions to share information in a country where banking secrecy has been at the core of the past success of these institutions. Despite this willingness to share as little as possible, some archival funds have gradually become available, most notably after businesses went bankrupt, changed hands, or simply disappeared. The present article relies on these sources to analyse the evolution of the Geneva stock exchange during the interwar period, which saw a gradual decline of its activity. Independent brokers strived to keep their oligopoly over banks. At the same time, Swiss German banks tried to penetrate the canton-controlled marketplace by using their federal rights and strength to become unavoidable actors. They could ultimately help local bankers gain direct access to the Geneva stock exchange, obliterating the power of brokers who were left with no other choice than to appeal to the Canton of Geneva to defend their position.

Thin markets create challenges for reporting market information by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and for users of the information. This study examines distributions of transactions comprising daily price reports in the U.S. hog market. We determine publicly reported daily prices are sensitive to which packing plants buy hogs. Transaction prices comprising USDA Agricultural Marketing Service price reports are not normally distributed; care must be taken in reporting and interpreting transaction prices. Economically important variations in prices occur because of packer-specific indicators. Daily reported prices are used as base prices in marketing agreements, making variation of even greater importance.

Meat goat producers were queried to determine subjective estimates of premiums they would receive for slaughter kids of various selection classes. Market-based predicted premium estimates were obtained via regression using published U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Marketing Service data. Subjective versus market-based predicted premium estimates were compared to determine producer accuracy in predicting premiums. Producers tended to overestimate quality premiums. Producers more accurate in their estimates tended to be larger-scale and older and to hold college degrees, sell more slaughter goats via auction, and manage their goats more intensively. Results contribute to the literature on producer accuracy in predicting prices.

An inverse live-hog demand model was estimated to analyze whether there has been a recent increase in the magnitude of live-hog, own-quantity demand flexibility. Estimating the impact of processing capacity-utilization rate changes on live-hog prices was a second objective of this research. Results indicate that live hog prices have become more responsive to changes in hog slaughter, slaughter weight, cold storage stocks, and changes in the processing capacity-utilization rate. Finally, model results indicate that the sharp increase in processing capacity-utilization rates, the increase in average dressed weight, and the increase in hog slaughter all had a negative effect on the live-hog prices.

This paper examines the industrialization process of U.S. agriculture by examining the trends in the number of farms, the concentration of production during the last decade, and the dynamics of farm survivability, entry, and exit underlying aggregate statistics. We next examine vertical coordination as part of the industrialization process and highlight contracting in the poultry industry. The analysis provides evidence that production is continuing to be concentrated on a smaller number of farms at a relatively rapid rate, in spite of the stability in the number of farms. Although contracting clearly dominates the broiler industry, it is less prevalent in egg and turkey production, where other forms of vertical coordination are likely established.

Produce growers in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee were surveyed in 2002 to gather information about their decision making in the areas of planting, postharvest handling, marketing, and expected changes. North Carolina has proportionately more respondents with large operations, and Kentucky and Tennessee were more similar and concentrated in smaller farms. Tennessee and Kentucky respondents were less likely to have engaged in activities that were associated with the commercial distribution system. Greater reliance on the commercial distribution system on the part of North Carolina growers is consistent with more produce export activity.

Les modèles de défauts de coordination ont pour objet le fonctionnement effectif des économies lorsque la fonction de coordination est laissée aux agents. Néanmoins, la réalisation des transactions à l'équilibre général et ses conséquences sur la détermination du niveau de l'activité et de l'emploi sont généralement passées sous silence. Dans ce texte, nous précisons le rôle joué par les externalités d'échange en étudiant la réalisation des transactions décentralisées. Nous explorons à cet effet un modèle de prospection monétaire dans lequel les externalités de participation dans les transactions conditionnent la détermination du niveau de l'activité et d'emploi d'équilibre. Les défauts de coordination sont ici liés à des prophéties auto-réalisatrices portant sur la réalisation des transactions. La technologie d'échange engendre trois équilibres inefficaces ordonnés en termes de bien-être. Nous montrons que l'utilisation de la monnaie comme intermédiaire facilite la décision de production et permet de surmonter les problèmes de coordination dans les transactions. Nous analysons l'effet d'un accroissement de la quantité de monnaie sur le niveau de l'activité. Nous discutons enfin de l'intérêt de l'approche retenue au sein de la littérature.