Michel Simioni

Organic Food Consumption Patterns

This research addresses two important issues for the future expansion of organic consumption in France. The first one is related to knowing whether the organic choice is a permanent feature of consumers attitude or not: Do organic buyers occasionally pick one organic product or do they choose organic for several categories? The second issue concerns the impact of prices on buying organics which is revisited, distinguishing between capturing new consumers and increasing the demand coming from people already involved in organic markets. These questions are examined using the market basket approach; the price issue requires further estimations of demand models. The study relies on two staple food products, eggs and milk. The findings are: (i) choosing organic for one of the two items reinforces the probability of purchasing also the organic version of the second item; (ii) marginal reductions of the organic price have no impact on the decision of buying organic rather than conventional products; (iii) when people already purchase organic products, they may be price sensitive; and (iv) organic buyers demographic profile is not related to income neither to age nor to family size, but to the educational level.

Price-Cost Margins and Structural Change: Sub-Contracting within the Salmon Marketing Chain

Some recent studies have benefited from advances in time series econometrics in order to evaluate price transmission mechanisms along the marketing chain. Due to the length of time series, structural changes may affect the evaluation of price-cost margins. In the case of the fresh salmon trade between Norway and France, the gross margin between producers and retailers has changed in level between January 1988 and December 1999. This article accurately identifies the date of a structural change using a range of recent ADF testing procedures (Gregory-Hansen tests, forward and backward recursive tests), before looking for the causes of the change through a survey. Two major factors can be identified: the product form and the marketing channel. Interestingly, both the increasing level of processing and the development of supermarket chains have resulted in a new role for the intermediaries, shifting from mere commercial intermediation to sub-contracting for the big retailers. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005.

Productivity Convergence in Vietnamese Manufacturing Industry: Evidence Using a Spatial Durbin Model

This paper applies the (beta )-convergence regression model in order to assess convergence of total factor productivity among Vietnamese provinces for manufacturing industries. Specifically, we express this model in the form of a Spatial Durbin Model (SDM), which allows us to take into account the presence of omitted variables that can be spatially correlated and correlated with the initial level of productivity. We calculate the annual total factor productivity (TFP) of 63 Vietnamese provinces and 6 manufacturing industries, using the results of the structural estimation of a value-added production function from firm data over the period from 2000 to 2012. The regression of growth rates of TFP over this period on the initial levels of productivity using SDM shows that there is convergence in most industries, i.e. the gap between lower-productivity and higher-productivity provinces decreases. These results also show the importance of modeling the indirect effect of the initial level of productivity of a province on its TFP growth rate, through its effect on neighboring provinces. The inclusion of these indirect effects is made possible by SDM and increases the speed of convergence for most considered manufacturing industries, except for metal and machinery, and transportation and telecommunication.