Gerald Schluter

Growth and Structural Change in U.S. Food and Fiber Industries: An Input-Output Perspective

We analyze growth and structural change of the food and fiber industries in the U.S. economy, 1972–82. Growth and structural changes are examined in terms of how changes in a sectors output can be apportioned between changes in (1) domestic final demand, (2) export demand, (3) interindustry demand, and (4) domestic supply ratios. Results indicate that growth of U.S. agricultural sectors is nearly equally dependent upon exports and domestic demand, while growth of processed food and nonfood agricultural processing sectors is heavily dependent on domestic demand.

Effect of Trade on the Demand for Skilled and Unskilled Workers

We use an input-output model to examine the effects of trade and domestic consumption, technology and labor productivity on skilled and unskilled worker demand. We found that trade was not the major contributor to changes in demand for skilled and unskilled labor during 1972-92, counter to the continuing debate on the trade-widening wage gap linkage. We found that skill intensity, i.e. the ratio of high-skilled to low-skilled workers for exports compared with imports, exceeded one during 1972-92, but did not increase. We explore alternative definitions of skilled and unskilled, and find our results to be robust to these alternative definitions.

Minimum Wage And Food Prices: An Analysis Of Price Pass-Through Effects

An Input-Output model is used to analyze price pass-through effects of a minimum wage increase on prices of the food and kindred product and food-service industry. Although these sectors employ a disproportionate share of minimum wage workers, our results suggest a

Income and employment generation in the food and fiber system

0.50 increase in the minimum wage would minimally affect food prices.

Monitoring the Agricultural Economy: Strains on the Data System

In the spirit of the classic Davis-Goldberg study of agribusiness, a procedure is presented for estimating and estimates of employment and income originating in the US Food and Fiber System. The Food and Fiber System is on net a nearly wholly domestic based subsystem of the economy accounting for employment for 18.5% of the civilian workforce and a source for 18% of total gross national product.

Is There a Link between the Changing Skills of Labor Used in U.S. Processed Food Trade and Rural Employment

parisons,1 and analysis of such issues as factor roles and shares, structure, interindustry dependencies, economic well-being of participants, industry capacity and utilization, and industry productivity. This discussion adopts the same definition of the food and fiber system that was used in the preceding paper. The system is composed of farming, marketing, and direct input supplying subsectors.

Demand-Driven Structural Changes in the U.S. Agribusiness Industry, 1972-1987:

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, processed food exports switched from using more skilled labor per unit of output than imports to the opposite. Processed food trade also expanded during this period. More meat and poultry products in processed food trade could explain this switch in skill intensity. Growing meat trade paralleled an urban-to-rural shift in meat processing. Although this could have been a win-win situation for rural areas, many of the jobs related to expanded meat trade benefited commuter and migrant workers because late-1990s jobs slaughtering livestock and processing meat did not appeal to domestic rural workers.

A Decomposed Negative Binomial Model of Structural Change: A Theoretical and Empirical Application to U.S. Agriculture

Output growth of the U.S. agribusiness industry is examined to apportion first the importance of domestic final demand. Growth of U.S. food procesing output is heavily dependent upon domestic final demand and particularly its personal consumption expenditures component.