Subsidiarity Economic Cost The effort to harmonize rules across the EU helped spawn separatist political movements, including the largest one, Brexit. Now policymakers in Brussels are trying to dampen objections to the cause by espousing subsidiarity, including in the next version of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). However, a study by Yuriy Gorodnichenko (UC-Berkeley), Debora Revoltella and Christopher Weiss (European Investment Bank), and Jan Svejnar (Colombia University) reveals the high cost of a disjointed Europe. They identify the cross-firm spread in labor and capital productivity in EU countries as being twice that of the U.S., mostly caused by disparate national regulations and language barriers. The authors calculate that re...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.