The effects of agro-food supply chain integration on product quality and financial performance: Evidence from Chinese agro-food processing business

Xiaofei Zhao, Ping Wang and Raktim Pal

International Journal of Production Economics, 2021, vol. 231, issue C

Abstract: Aiming at the unique characteristics of agro-food supply chain, this study builds a comprehensive model to investigate the impact of agro-food supply chain integration, composed of internal, supplier and customer integration, on agro-food product quality and financial performance. It explores the relationships among these factors using the data from 162 Chinese agro-food processing businesses. The findings reveal that internal integration and supplier integration are the critical factors to improve product quality within the context of agro-food supply chain. Moreover, the product quality fully mediates the relationship between internal integration and financial performance, and the relationship between supplier integration and financial performance. This study indicates that securing product quality and food safety is an effective way to achieve better financial performance for agro-food processing businesses. This study could help agro-food processing businesses understand the value creation roles of agro-food supply chain integration and provide valuable guidance for them to decide how to respond to various challenges and manage agro-food supply chain integration in order to improve product quality and achieve higher financial performance. A unique contribution of this study is to provide a theoretical framework for advancing the agro-food supply chain integration literature, which thereby could be expected to open a starting point for more agro-food supply chain integration research in the future.

Keywords: Agro-food supply chain (ASC); Internal integration (II); Supplier integration (SI); Customer integration (CI); Product quality (PQ); Financial performance (FP); Agro-food supply chain integration (ASCI) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527320302024
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:proeco:v:231:y:2021:i:c:s0925527320302024

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2020.107832

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Economics is currently edited by Stefan Minner

More articles in International Journal of Production Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().