Effect on the International Price of Maize on the Retail Price of Broiler Chicken in Costa Rica

This paper presents the results of an investigation carried out with the objective of estimating the impact of variations in maize international price on the poultry meat domestic price in Costa Rica. For the transmission of international price to CIF import price of maize (main ingredient in the chicken diet), a distributed lag autoregressive model was used after testing for cointegration of time series. The selling price to the final consumer was modeled with a reduced-form structural model. The results show how the international price of maize has an important impact on the formation of domestic chicken meat prices and requires that this be considered in the design of policies to reduce the dependence on the international price, which has a negative impact on the price in cases of unexpected increases or shocks