The economic impact on agriculture from the global coronavirus pandemic is still unknown but it cannot be good. Some speculate that recovery from a policy imposed economic coma should be quicker than, for example, the 2008/09 Great Recession involving financial sector structural failure. Others caution that it depends on how long policymakers suppress activity, whether there is a rebound due to premature reopening, or the disease becomes seasonal. Recently, some economists described a “swish” shaped economic recovery instead of a “V” shaped one. The Great Recession may be an imperfect proxy, but it is the most recent example of a large adverse economic event. One thing that is clear is that the annual growth i...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.