On the formation of price expectations in the fruit and vegetable export sector in south-eastern of Spain

Abstract

The temporal difference existing between the planning of the supply and the demand of agrarian products has caused that the theories about the formation of price expectations have a traditionally great importance in such sectors as those of vegetables and fruits. The tendency to a greater connexion between production and commercialisation in associated entities (in productive place) implies an increase of the efficiency on the use of available information to make forecats on the different variables in the market. The aim of the present study is to determine empirically the existence of price valuations, taking as a reference the production-comercialisation in the south-easterm horticultural sector of Spain, consider enterprises that sell fruits and vegetable institutions of food distribution in the framework of the European Union. For this purpuse, it has been started from the combination of traditional formulations of expectations based on retarded variables, on the one hand, and models of rational expectations, on the other. By this method is deduced the use of complementary information to the price retards; also, the relation existing between that use of information to both the degree of response of the supply regarding the fluctuations in prices and the efficiency on expectative formation is analysed.