Franco Rosa

Agricultural and oil commodities: price transmission and market integration between US and Italy

Purpose of this article it to get some evidences of market interaction between United States and Italy using the time series analysis of spot prices spanning from January 1999 to May 2012 for crude oil and three ag-commodities: wheat, corn and soybean. These crops have been selected for their relevance in ag-commodity exchanges between US and Italy markets. The integration between US and Italy agricultural markets is hypothesized for the consistent volume of crop traded between these two countries while the price transmission is related to the leading price signals of the CBT (Chicago Board of Trade). The integration between oil and ag-commodity markets is suggested both by the large use of energy intensive inputs, (fertilizer, seed, machinery) in production of these ag-commodities, and their use in biofuel production. The results suggest: a) for US market the evidence of market integration between crude oil and US ag-commodities; b) for Italy the integration with US ag-commodity markets and less evidence of integration with the oil market. These results are valuable information both for the agents and policy makers contributing to improve the information accuracy to predict the price movements used by marketing operators for their strategies and policy makers to set up policies to re-establish conditions of market efficiency and allocate these ag-commodities in alternative market channels.

Cross-Cultural Consumer Behavior: Use of Local Language for Market Communication—A Study in Region Friuli Venetia Giulia (Italy)

ABSTRACT Cross-cultural consumer behavior is of market interest due to globalization of marketplaces, migration, multicultural marketplaces, and diffusion in the EU of many languages. The objective of this study is to check whether the local language used in a marketing communication could affect the consumers’ preferences for food products. The theoretical foundation is the consumer motivational approach that goes deeper into motivations interfering with the consumers’ preference order. The multivariate conjoint analysis is used to evaluate the preferences for attributes described in different languages. A number of students from the University of Udine (located in the northeastern part of Italy) have been submitted to interviews to examine their preferences for a simulated sandwich package reporting information in different languages, distributed by vendor machine. The results suggest that the consumer’s reaction to local language depends on sociodemographic profile, cultural background, language knowledge, and family education, and the local language could actually be used as a market tool for market segmentation. These results are of interest to many EU countries with bilingual communities such as Spain, Belgium, the UK, Switzerland, and most of the Italian regions where local languages are still alive.

X-farm : Modelling Sustainable Farming Systems

The aim of this chapter is to illustrate the structure of X-farm, a model to manage farming systems under energetic, economical and ecological perspectives, using the dynamic simulation approach. The structure of X-farm is composed by some integrated modules representing the main centres of farming costs and production: soil management, crop production and processing and energy production and administration. The dynamic simulation is addressed to find the best combination of crop and livestock activities in the farm plan. The objective of energy production is afforded by using crops and reducing the energy use by optimising energy-saving techniques; the ecological objective is formulated by accounting the CO2 emissions; the economic objective is targeted to profit maximisation, constrained by the level of achievement of the energy and ecology targets. The dynamic simulation is expected to help in improving the farm management performance with the simultaneous achievement of the three objectives. Finally, combining the X-farm model with GIS techniques, the analysis will be expanded to the agro-district planning to support the regional strategy for agro-energy production.

Testing for the Intertemporal Separability Hypothesis on Italian Food Demand

During the last forty years, consumer demand analysis has evolved toward a systemwide approach. Since Working’s work (1943) on Engel curves, the “demand-system” models which have been mainly used by economists are the Linear Expenditure System proposed by Stone (1954) (e.g., Andrikopoulos, Brox and Carvahlo, 1984; Andrikopoulos, Brox and Georgakopoulos, 1987; Kennes, 1983; Michalek and Keyzer, 1992) and the Almost Ideal Demand System proposed by Deaton and Muellbauer (1980) (e.g., Blanciforti and Green, 1983; Burton and Young,1992; Chen and Veeman,1991; Chesher and Rees, 1987; Dono, 1991; Dono and Thompson, 1994; Fulponi, 1989; Karagiannis and Velentzas, 1995; Mergos and Donatos, 1989; Michalek and Keyzer, 1992; Molina, 1994; Moschini and Meilke, 1989; Pierani and Rizzi, 1991; Ray, 1980; Reynold and Goddard, 1991).