Do Food Scares Explain Supplier Concentration? An Analysis of EU Agri-food Imports

Akiko Suwa-Eisenmann, Olivier Cadot and Melise Jaud ()

No 7431, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper documents a decreasing trend in the geographical concentration of EU agro-food imports. Decomposing the concentration indices into intensive and extensive margins components, we find that the decrease in overall concentration indices results from two diverging trends: the pattern of trade diversifies at the extensive margin (EU countries have been sourcing their agri-food products from a wider range of suppliers), while geographical concentration increases at the intensive-margin (EU countries have concentrated their imports on a few major suppliers). This leads to an increasing inequality in market shares between a small group of large suppliers and a majority of small suppliers. We then move on to exploit a database of food alerts at the EU border that had never been exploited before. After coding it into HS8 categories, we regress the incidence of food alerts by product on determinants including exporter dummies as well as HS8 product dummies. Coefficients on product dummies provide unbiased estimates of the intrinsic vulnerability of exported products to food alerts, as measured at the EU border. We incorporate the product risk coefficient as an explanatory variable in a regression of geographical concentration and show that concentration is higher for risky products.

Keywords: Agricultural trade; European union; Food; Import concentration; Sanitary risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F1 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-eec, nep-int and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP7431 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Do food scares explain supplier concentration? An analysis of EU agri-food imports (2013)
Working Paper: Do food scares explain supplier concentration? An analysis of EU agri-food imports (2013)
Working Paper: Do food scares explain supplier concentration? An analysis of EU agri-food imports (2013)
Working Paper: Do Food Scares Explain Supplier Concentration? An Analysis of EU Agri-food Imports (2010)
Working Paper: Do food scares explain supplier concentration ? An analysis of EU agri-food imports (2009)
Working Paper: Do food scares explain supplier concentration? An analysis of EU agri-food imports (2009)
Working Paper: Do food scares explain supplier concentration? An analysis of EU agri-food imports (2009)
Working Paper: Do food scares explain supplier concentration ? An analysis of EU agri-food imports (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:7431

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP7431

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().