THREE ESSAYS ON TREE FRUIT MARKETING AND TRADE

Thesis (Ph.D.), School of Economic Sciences, Washington State UniversityThis dissertation consists of three studies about tree fruit marketing and trade. The first study derives an implicit cost system based on LaFrance and Pope demand system with an empirical application for tree fruit. The economic and econometric approach improves preciseness and accuracy of elasticities for policy analysis. The demand system is estimated using iterative seemingly unrelated regression and tree fruitgeneralized method of moments with autocorrelation corrections. Elasticities are estimated for fresh and processed tree fruit. Findings indicate that implicit cost system outperformed the Translog system. Also, we conclude that increased U.S. exports drove up the farm level demand and grower prices for fresh tree fruit from 1980 to 2009. The second study presents an intertemporal economic model to estimate economic impacts of a single tree fruit pest and disease outbreak. The model is designed to examine the economic consequences of pest and disease outbreak on demand and supply with international trade. Our approach is to use a dynamic simulation of the single tree fruit industry under scenarios with and without outbreak to compare the stream of simulated outcomes and the consequences for measures of economic welfare of producers in the industry and consumers. An empirical application of hypothetical fire blight outbreak in the U.S. pear industry is conducted.The third study analyzes the effectiveness of advertising and promotional activities conducted by the Pear Bureau Northwest (PBN) on fresh pears during 2007/08 to 2011/12 crop marketing seasons using a nonparametric estimation method. The main results of this study show a predominately positive and significant role of advertising expenditures in promoting all winter pears and D'Anjou pears demand and in gaining positive marginal net returns to pear growers. However, the advertising effectiveness shows interregional disparity and varies promotional types and pear varieties. This study also found domestic demand for all winter pears and D'Anjou pears was significantly related to a number of other factors. We find that prices are more sensitive during economic recession than previously reported.School of Economic Sciences, Washington State Universit