Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, DOI: 10.1017/aae.2016.29.
This paper reviews the extant literature on competitiveness of agricultural product and input markets. While researchers in the US and Europe have tended to emphasize different stages of the agricultural and food-marketing system, their focus is the same conceptually: the extent of buyer power, although both have largely ignored the sector supplying inputs to agriculture. The key conclusion to be drawn is that there is little robust empirical evidence for food processing firms exerting buyer power, and that there is a currently limited data concerning the nature of vertical contracts between food processing and agriculture, but there is a small but evolving body of evidence concerning food retailer behavior and vertical coordination between food retailing and processing.
