Is There Any Asymmetry Between Wholesale and Consumer Food Prices in Selected European Countries and Turkey?

Vertical price linkages (transmission mechanism) constitute an important pillar of food and agricultural economics research. These linkages contain information on the relationships between the economic units of the supply chain at different levels. This study aims to investigate the existence of an imperfect price transmission mechanism in the food markets of the selected countries between January 2000 and January 2018. For this purpose, the transmission mechanism between producer and consumer prices in the food supply chain is analyzed via a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model (NARDL). The results show that asymmetric price transmission is not a market anomaly, but it is a common situation in the market. The results imply that the presence of asymmetric price transmission in the food market might trigger inequalities by mainly decreasing the income of the lower-income groups.