Assessing post-harvest labor shortages, wages, and welfare

Andrew Cassey (), Kwanyoung Lee, Jeremy Sage and Peter Tozer
Additional contact information
Kwanyoung Lee: Washington State University
Jeremy Sage: University of Montana

Agricultural and Food Economics, 2018, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-24

Abstract: Abstract For horticultural commodities, labor is necessary for post-harvest activities such as management, marketing, packing, and distribution. We create a model with pre- and post-harvest tasks and transportation network to study how a shortage in the pre-harvest labor market affects the post-harvest labor market and downstream commodity markets. Parameterized to U.S. pome and prunus industries, we find output prices are 16% greater, the prunus industry does less well adjusting, and producers benefit despite output reductions. Producers’ benefit comes almost exclusively from higher prices, but decreases when the resulting post-harvest labor shortage increases spoilage along the transportation network.

Keywords: Post-harvest; Labor shortage; Transportation; Pome; Prunus; Welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J43 Q13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s40100-018-0112-6 Abstract (text/html)

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:spr:agfoec:v:6:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1186_s40100-018-0112-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nomics/journal/40100

DOI: 10.1186/s40100-018-0112-6

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural and Food Economics is currently edited by Alessandro Banterle, Liesbeth Dries, Andrea Marchini and Carlo Russo

More articles in Agricultural and Food Economics from Springer, Italian Society of Agricultural Economics (SIDEA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().