| The global trend of industrializing agriculture increasingly transforms farms and firms into specialized component suppliers within a multi-stage food processing chain, which creates intraindustry trade between- and within geographical regions. This can be analyzed within the framework of a hypothetical multiregional food-processing firm that benefits from outsourcing of various ‘tasks’ to other sub-contracting regions, in order to utilize lower production cost there. This paper demonstrates how this can be modeled as a multi-output cost minimization problem of the processing firm, and it is argued that with respect to agriculture, the outsourcing opportunities for the firm are determined by economies of diversification. Trade is implicitly reflected as... |
