Producer price disparities in the EU agriculture: Divergence or convergence?

Abstract

The issue of price disparities in the EU commodity markets has given rise to a fair amount of empirical and theoretical research. Price convergence studies were generally on the aggregate level, and investigated the convergence of inflation among countries. This study aims to investigate the convergence of agricultural price disparities among the EU member states, based on different individual agricultural products. The analysis shows the existence of agricultural price convergence among the EU member states since 1991, even including some countries were not members of the EU. Furthermore, the speed of convergence differs among agricultural products and also between the sub-periods as 1991-2000 and 2000-2008.