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Abstract
Over the past three decades vertical price transmission
analysis has been the subject of considerable attention in
applied agricultural economics. It has been argued that the
existence of asymmetric price transmission generates rents for
marketing and processing agents. Retail prices allegedly move
faster upwards than downwards in response to farm level price
movements. This is an important issue for many agricultural
markets, including the Iranian chicken market. Chicken is an
important source of nutrition in Iranian society and many rural
households depend on this commodity market as a source of income.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent, if any,
of asymmetric price transmission in Iran chicken market using
the Houck, Error Correction and Threshold models. The analysis
is based on weekly chicken price data at farm and retail levels
over the period October 2002 to March 2006. The results of
tests on all three models show that price transmission in Iranian
chicken market is long-run symmetric, but short-run asymmetric.
Increases in the farm price transmit immediately to the retail
level, while decreases in farm price transmit relatively more
slowly to the retail level. We conjecture the asymmetric price
transmission in this market is the result of high inflation rates
that lead the consumers to expect continual price increases and
a different adjustment costs in the upwards direction compared
to the downwards direction for the marketing agents and a noncompetitive
slaughtering industry and that looking for ways to
make this sector of the chicken supply chain more competitive
will foster greater price transmission symmetry and lead to
welfare gains for both consumers and agricultural producers.