John M. Connor - Böcker

This book covers the growth, economic development, and business management of the US commercial food processing industry. Topics include the strategic options of food processors when facing the many distribution channels and sourcing options currently available; new processing and information technologies; the effect of biotechnological developments on the food processing industry, and an analysis of whether the food processing sector has participated in the overall improvement of the US economy.

The goal of "Global Price Fixing" is to describe and analyze the origins, operation, and impacts of global cartels in the markets for lysine, citric acid, and vitamins. The work is fundamentally a historical approach to understanding the interplay among personal motivations, economic forces, and the enforcement of the competition laws of the major industrial nations. The first chapter highlights the renewed importance of international price-fixing conspiracies after an absence of nearly 50 years. Two following chapters provide background on the economics theory and legal principals relevant to understanding cartels. Nine following chapters comprise the economic core of this book. Three chapters are devoted to each of the three cartels selected for intensive study: citric acid, lysine, and vitamins. The next four chapters then concentrate on the legal fallout from the discovery of the three cartels by the world's antitrust authorities. Chapter 17 provides a description of a few additional selected cartels with features not found in the lysine, citric acid, and vitamins cases.The penultimate chapter considers whether the antitrust resources of government agencies and private plaintiffs are sufficient to deter global price fixing in the foreseeable future. This final chapter attempts to identify major themes that appear throughout the book and to provide a summary of the ultimate impact of the global-cartel pandemic of the 1990s.

Some books get written, others write themselves. This book is the latter type. I have devoted myselfto studying the economic organization of industries related to food and agriculture for almost twenty-five years. It has been my good fortune to work at places that tolerated my gadfly approach to research. So long as I produced a few publications each year and wooed a few graduate students to share those interests, I was free to pursue an array of topics: why firms diversifY, the competitive role of advertising, strategies for selling in overseas markets, measuring market power, and many others. Although firmly anchored in the eclectic analytical framework of industrial economics and focused on the food system, I traversed a wide field at will. Some years ago, I had pretty much convinced myself that naked price fixing was not a high priority for scholarship in these industries. True, collusion was rife in a few food industries, such as bid-rigging among suppliers of fluid milk to school districts in isolated rural districts. Ripping off milk money from school children is reprehensible enough, but the size of the economic losses from localized price fixing paled besides other sources of imperfect competition.

I have devoted myself to studying the economic organization of industries for thirty years. It has been my good fortune to work at places that tol- ated my gadfly approach to research. So long as I produced a few publi- tions each year and wooed a few graduate students to share those interests, I was free to sample a smorgasbord of economic delights: why firms div- sify, the competitive role of advertising, strategies for selling in overseas markets, measuring market power, and many others. Although firmly - chored in the eclectic analytical framework of industrial economics and focused on the food system, I traversed a wide field at will. A decade ago I had pretty much convinced myself that naked price fixing was not a high priority for scholarship. True, collusion was rife in a few industries, such as bid-rigging among suppliers of fluid milk to school districts in isolated rural districts. Ripping off milk money from school children is reprehensible enough, but the size of the economic losses from localized price fixing paled besides other sources of imperfect competition. Moreover, there were no great policy debates about the wisdom or me- ods of enforcing the price-fixing prohibitions in the Nation’s antitrust laws.