Serving indigenous dishes in hotels: An inquiry into the conative response of menu decision makers

Indigenous cuisines – in many developing economies – play a central role in the celebrations, cultural practices and festivals of the local people, but their presence on hotel food service menu is often insignificant. Yet, little is known about the determinants of menu decision making with regards to the inclusion of indigenous dishes on the hotel menu. Using a survey of menu decision makers from 184 small and medium sized hotels, this study explores the factors affecting menu decision-makers’ attitudes and intention to place more variety of indigenous dishes on the hotel menu. Findings shed intriguing insights into the role of antecedents like normative beliefs, perceived benefits to business, perceived difficulties in production and service of indigenous dishes as well as customer patronage. Among other implications for theory and practice, the findings foray into the debate on the relevance of attitude in driving behavioural intention in workplace situations.     

新时期中国粮食补贴政策的战略协同与差异设计

本研究在梳理新时期中国粮食补贴政策体系的基础上,分析政策体系存在的政策主体多元且程序繁琐、补贴标准偏低且范围偏窄以及补贴依据不合理且对象错位等问题.针对新形势,本文提出了粮食补贴政策与乡村振兴、粮食安全、农业市场化、农业规模化、农业现代化、农业信息化、开放型农业等战略的协同布局;并且,本文提出了新时期粮食补贴政策的差异...     

关于我国粮食安全评价指标体系的探讨

本文对粮食安全的概念进行了梳理,全面介绍了联合国粮农组织和美国农业部的粮食安全评价指标体系和评价结果,对国内已有的研究成果进行了客观、具体的评价.在充分借鉴国内外学术界最新研究成果的基础上,对构建和完善我国粮食安全状况评价指标体系进行了深入探讨,建立了新的更加符合实际的粮食安全系数计算方法,并运用这一方法对我国及其他主要粮食生产国或消费国的粮食安全状况进行了测算,得出了我国粮食安全程度较高的结论.     

Volatility in Oilseeds and Vegetable Oils Markets: Drivers and Spillovers

Food price volatility has re‐emerged as an important topic of political discussion since the food price crisis of 2007–2008. Different volatility drivers have been identified for different markets in the theoretical and empirical literature. However, there is no comprehensive analysis that considers a large number of potential drivers and investigates their joint effects in a dynamic model of interrelated markets. Our study provides such a volatility analysis for the oilseeds and vegetable oils markets. We use a common GARCH approach and a VAR model to identify volatility drivers and spillover effects. Our results show that exchange rate volatility is very important. However, the hotly debated financialisation of commodity markets is not found to be volatility increasing in our monthly data. Impulse response functions show strong spillover effects. Because many volatility drivers found to be important in other markets have no significant effect in our study, our results suggest that volatility drivers are market specific. This implies that any volatility‐reducing policies need to be designed for the market in question.     

Price Discrimination in Russian Wheat Exports: Evidence from Firm‐level Data

Russia emerged as an important wheat exporter in recent years raising the question of how this will affect international wheat markets. In particular developing countries – the main destination of Russian wheat exports – could be harmed by aggressive pricing behaviour. This article analyses the exertion of price discrimination by Russian wheat exporting firms based on Krugman's pricing‐to‐market hypothesis. We apply Knetter's panel model to a firm‐level dataset and find evidence for price‐discriminating behaviour by Russian firms in 25 out of 61 destination countries over the period 2002–2011.     

World Commodity Prices and Domestic Retail Food Price Inflation: Some Insights from the UK

We focus on two aspects of the links between world commodity prices and retail food price inflation: first, the effects of exchange rates and other input costs, and second; the effects of the duration of shocks on world commodity markets, not just the magnitude of price spikes (the latter often commanding most attention). The UK offers a natural and rather unexplored setting for the analysis. Applying time series methods to a sample of 259 monthly observations over the 1990(9)–2012(3) period we find substantial and significant long‐term partial elasticities for domestic food price inflation with respect to world food commodity prices, the exchange rate and oil prices (the latter indirectly via a relationship with world food commodity prices). Domestic demand pressures and food chain costs are found to be less substantial and significant over our data period. Interactions between the main driving variables in the system tend to moderate rather than exacerbate these partial effects. Furthermore, the persistence of shocks to these variables markedly affects their effects on domestic food prices.     

Measuring the Impact of Price-Induced Innovation on Technological Progress: Application to the U.S. Food Processing and Distribution Sector

A model of price-induced innovation is presented incorporating long-run prices as arguments in the production function serving the role of stimulating firms to seek innovations. The empirical application examines the production structure and technological progress of the U.S. food processing and distribution sector for the period 1948–1991. The empirical model separates scarcity, innovation, and exogenous technical change responses in analyzing the Morishima elasticities for input combinations and multifactor input biases. The results suggest significant structural changes occurring in the food processing and distribution sector since 1980. Focusing on multifactor input bias, results suggest that there are no wide changes in technical change patterns over the last forty years. However, Morishima elasticity results suggest a more varied pattern of technical change between inputs. The price-induced technical progress has a dominant contribution on input decisions compared with the exogenous technical change.     

Attributes that influence the evaluation of travel dining experience: When East meets West

Many destination marketers have utilized gastronomy as a source of new products and activities to attract tourists. Despite the substantial rise in the Chinese outbound market, very little is known about how Chinese tourists evaluate their travel dining experiences. By using narrative analysis, this study examines attributes that may affect Chinese tourists' evaluation of their travel dining experiences. On-site participant observation and focus group interviews were conducted, respectively, with Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong group tourists, while they were on holiday in Australia. A total of 15 attributes were identified, which were classified under the following six categories: tourists' own food culture, the contextual factor of the dining experience, variety and diversity of food, perception of the destination, service encounter, and tour guide's performance. The respective implications of the attributes on travel dining experience are also discussed.     

Food management in tourism: Reducing tourism’s carbon ‘foodprint’

Food production and consumption have a range of sustainability implications, including their contribution to global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). As some foodstuffs entail higher GHG emissions than others, managing their use in tourism-related contexts could make a significant contribution to climate change mitigation. This article reviews the carbon intensity of selected foods and discusses how foodservice providers could adapt their practices. It shows that even though food management could substantially reduce the GHG emissions of foodservice providers, its application is currently hampered by the complexity of food production chains and a lack of dependable data on the GHG intensity of foodstuffs. Nevertheless, it is possible to make a number of recommendations in respect of how foodservice providers can better purchase, prepare and present foods. Further research is now needed to refine and extend our understanding of the contribution that food management can make to reducing tourism’s carbon ‘foodprint’.     

Factors influencing tourist food consumption

This study attempts to identify the salient factors affecting tourist food consumption. By reviewing available studies in the hospitality and tourism literature and synthesising insights from food consumption and sociological research, five socio-cultural and psychological factors influencing tourist food consumption are identified: cultural/religious influences, socio-demographic factors, food-related personality traits, exposure effect/past experience, and motivational factors. The findings further suggest that the motivational factors can be categorised into five main dimensions: symbolic, obligatory, contrast, extension, and pleasure. Given the lack of research in examining tourist food consumption systematically, the multidisciplinary approach adopted in this study allows a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon which forms the basis for further research and conceptual elaboration.