| The pork meat industry in Chile exhibits significant rates of production growth, with a decreasing trend in the wholesale market price and growing levels of concentration of the supply in a reduced number of companies. The structural element that sustains concentration and expansion of the production is the presence of increasing returns to scale in the production process. This investigation had the objective to verify the presence of economies of scale in this industry. Using a Cobb-Douglas cost function and the assumption of maximization of the benefits of the company in imperfect competition markets, an econometric model was estimated, that allowed considering indirectly the coefficients of the function of underlying production. One was that for the... |
