World Perspectives

Equilibration of Food Prices

International trade is supposed to equilibrate prices as the supply of goods or services flow to where they deemed more precious. Hog prices in Europe are currently 57 percent higher than in the U.S., which some believe creates an opportunity for transatlantic pork sales. However, open markets do not automatically overcome price differences caused by transportation, consumer preference, quality, exchange rates and other factors. The EU is a single market, but not all members of the trading bloc belong to the eurozone. Eastern European countries complained about poorer quality food, but their consumers were not always willing or able to pay as much as those in richer parts of Europe. The EU’s geographic preferences reinforce different...

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From WPI Consulting

Communicating importance of value-added products

Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.

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