Economies of Scale in the Canadian Food Processing Industry

Jean-Philippe Gervais (), Olivier Bonroy and Steve Couture

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Cost functions for three Canadian manufacturing agri-food sectors (meat, bakery and dairy) are estimated using provincial data from 1990 to 1999. A translog functional form is used and the concavity property is imposed locally. The Morishima substitution elasticities and returns to scale elasticities are computed for different provinces. Inference is carried out using asymptotic theory as well as bootstrap methods. In particular, the ability of the double bootstrap to provide refinements in inference is investigated. The evidence suggests that there are significant substitution possibilities between the agricultural input and other production factors in the meat and bakery sectors. Scale elasticity parameters indicate that increasing returns to scale are present in small bakery industries. While point estimates suggest that increasing returns to scale exist at the industry level in the meat sector, statistical inference cannot rule the existence of decreasing returns to scale. To account for supply management in the dairy sector, separability between raw milk and the other inputs was introduced. There exists evidence of increasing returns to scale at the industry level in the dairy industries of Alberta and New Brunswick. The scale elasticity for the two largest provinces (Ontario and Quebec) is greater than one, but inference does not reject the null hypothesis of increasing returns to scale.

Keywords: Translog cost function; Canadian food processing industry; returns to scale; double bootstrap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C30 D24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-bec and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/64/1/MPRA_paper_64.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:64

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().