Marketing Functions, Markets, and Food Price Formation
Author(s)
Timmer, C. Peter; Falcon, Walter P.; Pearson, Scott R.
Abstract
This chapter is designed to provide food policy analysts with an understanding of all three topics. It employs an introduction to the issues that make marketing, markets, and price formation important to food policy analysts; a guide to the data needed to describe and understand the marketing sector and price formation; an outline of the theoretical perspectives and empirical techniques of analysis that permit analysts to reach rough judgments on the extent and social costs of inefficiencies in marketing and distortions in price formation; and a summary of the instruments available for government intervention in both marketing and price formation and a policy discussion of the likely costs and benefits of such interventions.
