Книги

The present study attempts to offer more insights into the Greek wine market with emphasis on wines produced from organically grown grapes by relating wine choice to consumers’ personal value structure. With the use of a qualitative sample and applying the Means-end Chains methodology and the corresponding “laddering” interviewing technique, it attempts first to reveal the way basic motives are linked to wine shopping behaviour of consumers and the way wine purchase-relevant knowledge is stored and organised in their memory in relation to their personal values. Then, by discriminating between organic food buyers and non-buyers, the study identifies motivational and cognitive discriminating differences between the two consumer types, which can offer a solid explanation as to their distinctive purchasing behaviour in respect of the organic products.

In this paper we apply the technical inefficiency effect model to a set of eight different crop products (i.e., wheat, mixed arable crops, tobacco, cotton, olive oil, fruits, vegetables, and greenhouse horticulture) in Greek agriculture.

For each product, a panel data set covering the period 1991- 1995 is used and separate econometric results are obtained for each product. A particular set of socioeconomic and demographic variables is used to explain technical efficiency differentials among Greek farmers, including the direct subsidies given to each farmer, and the concordance of these efficiency determinants is discussed across the eight different crop products considered.

Empirical evidence suggests that agricultural futures price movements have fat-tailed distributions and exhibit sudden and unexpected price jumps. There is also evidence that the volatility of futures prices contains a term structure depending on both calendar-time and time to maturity. This paper extends Bates (1991) jump-diffusion option pricing model by including both seasonal and maturity effects in volatility. An in-sample fit to market option prices on wheat futures shows that our model outperforms previous models considered in the literature. A numerical example illustrates the economic significance of our results for option valuation.

Regional grain production in the Russian Federation has developed in a number of different ways over the last years. The same is true for grain marketing. Not only the prices on local markets but also those in the nation-wide grain trade seem to be at least strongly influenced by regional authorities.

However, it is very likely that only a small part of the grain trade is exchanged interregionally. The growing independence of the Russian Federation’s political subjects seems to be primarily responsible for regional differences concerning grain production and marketing. The 1998 economic crisis is likely to obstruct the development of an efficient domestic grain market further.

This paper examines the extent of interregional integration of Russian food markets from different perspectives. Though food price levels in Russia are converging after the period of hyperinflation, remote regions like the Far East seem to be on a different price path. With regard to the interregional commodity flows, it could be shown that interregional transportation of grain is unlikely to have decreased significantly, if the figures are corrected for imports and feed use. But a cross-sectional regression analysis using differences between regional production and consumption revealed that regional surpluses as well as deficits for all products tend to diminish, which means that the Russian regions increasingly rely on their regional production and not on interregional trade.