Frank Asche

Product Aggregation, Market Integration, and Relationships between Prices: An Application to World Salmon Markets

Relationships between prices of goods have held interest within economics in at least two areas - market integration and product aggregation. There is a close relationship between market integration and aggregation, although this has not received much attention in the more recent literature. This relationship may increase the usefulness of market integration studies. In this paper, these relationships are developed and illustrated by an application to the world salmon market. It is shown that the Law of One Price holds for an international market with five salmon species. This result has significant implications for the world salmon market regarding both product aggregation in demand analyses and international trade policy.

Sustainability and Global Seafood

Tight coupling to ecosystems and dependence on common-pool resources threaten fisheries and aquaculture. Although seafood is the most highly traded food internationally, it is an often overlooked component of global food security. It provides essential local food, livelihoods, and export earnings. Although global capture fisheries production is unlikely to increase, aquaculture is growing considerably. Sustaining seafoods contributions to food security hinges on the ability of institutions, particularly in developing countries, to protect and improve ecosystem health in the face of increasing pressures from international trade.

Salmon lice – impact on wild salmonids and salmon aquaculture

Salmon lice, Lepeophtheirus salmonis, are naturally occurring parasites of salmon in sea water. Intensive salmon farming provides better conditions for parasite growth and transmission compared with natural conditions, creating problems for both the salmon farming industry and, under certain conditions, wild salmonids. Salmon lice originating from farms negatively impact wild stocks of salmonids, although the extent of the impact is a matter of debate. Estimates from Ireland and Norway indicate an odds ratio of 1.1:1-1.2:1 for sea lice treated Atlantic salmon smolt to survive sea migration compared to untreated smolts. This is considered to have a moderate population regulatory effect. The development of resistance against drugs most commonly used to treat salmon lice is a serious concern for both wild and farmed fish. Several large initiatives have been taken to encourage the development of new strategies, such as vaccines and novel drugs, for the treatment or removal of salmon lice from farmed fish. The newly sequenced salmon louse genome will be an important tool in this work. The use of cleaner fish has emerged as a robust method for controlling salmon lice, and aquaculture production of wrasse is important towards this aim. Salmon lice have large economic consequences for the salmon industry, both as direct costs for the prevention and treatment, but also indirectly through negative public opinion.

Fish Is Food - The FAO’s Fish Price Index

World food prices hit an all-time high in February 2011 and are still almost two and a half times those of 2000. Although three billion people worldwide use seafood as a key source of animal protein, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations–which compiles prices for other major food categories–has not tracked seafood prices. We fill this gap by developing an index of global seafood prices that can help to understand food crises and may assist in averting them. The fish price index (FPI) relies on trade statistics because seafood is heavily traded internationally, exposing non-traded seafood to price competition from imports and exports. Easily updated trade data can thus proxy for domestic seafood prices that are difficult to observe in many regions and costly to update with global coverage. Calculations of the extent of price competition in different countries support the plausibility of reliance on trade data. Overall, the FPI shows less volatility and fewer price spikes than other food price indices including oils, cereals, and dairy. The FPI generally reflects seafood scarcity, but it can also be separated into indices by production technology, fish species, or region. Splitting FPI into capture fisheries and aquaculture suggests increased scarcity of capture fishery resources in recent years, but also growth in aquaculture that is keeping pace with demand. Regionally, seafood price volatility varies, and some prices are negatively correlated. These patterns hint that regional supply shocks are consequential for seafood prices in spite of the high degree of seafood tradability.

On Price Indices in the Almost Ideal Demand System

A number of papers have discussed the relationship between the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) and its linear approximation (LA/AIDS). In this paper, it is shown that if the prices in the system are normalized to one, the AIDS and LA/AIDS representations are identical at the point of normalization. Also, at the point of normalization, the expressions for price and expenditure elasticities from both systems are identical. Copyright 1997, Oxford University Press.

The Salmon Disease Crisis in Chile

Abstract The Chilean salmon farming industry is currently facing unprecedented economic losses related to the infectious salmon anemia (ISA) disease. Production of Atlantic salmon is being reduced from almost 400,000 tonnes in 2005 to an estimated 100,000 tonnes in 2010. The spread of and response to the disease raises a number of important issues with respect to the actions of the companies involved as well as the regulatory body. It is particularly interesting that adequate measures have not been implemented in Chile, as the species is farmed in relatively few countries and, as such, is fairly transparent. Moreover, all other major salmon- producing countries have experienced the disease, and several of the largest companies in Chile are multinationals with first-hand experience with ISA from other countries. JEL Classification Codes: K32, Q22

European Market Integration for Gas? Volume Flexibility and Political Risk

Gas exports to the Continent are regulated by long term take-or-pay contracts. The contracts are described and analyzed. We thereafter examine whether the most central European gas market, the German market, is integrated. Are there substantial price differences between gas from different export countries, and do prices move together? Time series of Norwegian, Dutch and Russian gas export prices to Germany in 1990-1998 are examined. Cointegration tests show that the different border prices for gas to Germany move proportionally over time, indicating an integrated gas market (the Law of One Price holds). We find differences in mean prices, with Russian gas being sold at prices systematically lower than Dutch and Norwegian gas. Among the explanatory factors for price discrepancies are differences in volume flexibility (swing) and perceived political risk.

Price relationships in the petroleum market: an analysis of crude oil and refined product prices

In this paper the relationships between crude oil and refined product prices are investigated in a multivariate framework. This allows us to test several (partly competing) assumptions of earlier studies. In particular, we find that the crude oil price is weakly exogenous and that the spread is constant in some but not all relationships. Moreover, the multivariate analysis shows that the link between crude oil prices and several refined product prices implies market integration for these refined products. This is an example of supply driven market integration and producers will change the output mix in response to price changes.

Market Delineation and Demand Structure

This paper addresses the relationship between the cointegration approach to market delineation and the more traditional approach of analyzing the demand structure among different products in terms of degree of substitutability. Cointegration tests for market delineation and estimation of a dynamic system of demand equations are undertaken utilizing the same data set. The data set consists of three high-quality seafood products in the European Union. The results are encouraging as the results from the two approaches are not only compatible, but are also complementary in the sense that they provide more information together than they do separately. Copyright 1997, Oxford University Press.

The Fishery Performance Indicators: A Management Tool for Triple Bottom Line Outcomes

Pursuit of the triple bottom line of economic, community and ecological sustainability has increased the complexity of fishery management; fisheries assessments require new types of data and analysis to guide science-based policy in addition to traditional biological information and modeling. We introduce the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs), a broadly applicable and flexible tool for assessing performance in individual fisheries, and for establishing cross-sectional links between enabling conditions, management strategies and triple bottom line outcomes. Conceptually separating measures of performance, the FPIs use 68 individual outcome metrics—coded on a 1 to 5 scale based on expert assessment to facilitate application to data poor fisheries and sectors—that can be partitioned into sector-based or triple-bottom-line sustainability-based interpretative indicators. Variation among outcomes is explained with 54 similarly structured metrics of inputs, management approaches and enabling conditions. Using 61 initial fishery case studies drawn from industrial and developing countries around the world, we demonstrate the inferential importance of tracking economic and community outcomes, in addition to resource status.