Task 5.4 Persistence of supply chain relations (M24-34) Lead partner: IAMO; Task members: All partners leading a case study

This task focuses on chain relation histories in order to analyse persistence, and thus sustainability and its determinants of business/trade relationships along the selected food supply chains. The market entry and exit of a certain supply chain actor (eg, food producers, traders, or retailers) will be analysed as required for the integrated model development through proportional survival-hazard model allowing for time-varying covariates, ie, the risk of slipping out of a certain supply chain changes with the length of time an actor spent in this chain. By considering the data availability, the following country commodity are analysed: salmon from Norway at the firm level trade data, wheat from France at country level trade data, and dairy from Germany, France and UK at country level trade data are studied. The additional impact of a number of covariates, such as firm’s trade characteristics, geographic/regional conditions, and trade or production policies are assessed. In particular, the effects of economic integration agreements on the stability of product-level trade relationships for European export firms, together with the analysis of determinants of trade flow durations, is analysed. Patterns of persistence (ie, sustainability) of selected supply chains in different countries is identified by comparing the estimation results obtained (ie, survival-hazard model). The results show higher persistency for wheat, and dairy at the EU level and lower persistency for Norwegian salmon. Additionally, we recognised increase of persistency for dairy products after elimination of milk quota. Generally speaking, different markets show different level of persistency back to the nature of products, available competition in the market, trade policy in place or production policy in place.