Because of the important role that transportation, wholesaling, and retailing activities, commonly referred to as distribution or marketing activities, play most economies, a project is underway to develop a GTAP model and database that includes domestic margins. This paper reports on the type of margin data that has been collected and draws some general conclusions that will be useful in devel...

The world food and financial crises threaten to undermine the real incomes of urban consumers in eastern and southern Africa. This study investigates patterns in staple food prices, wage rates, and marketing margins for urban consumers in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia between 1993 and 2009. There is high correlation among wage rate series for various government and private sector catego...

The importance of optimal marketing communications mix decisions is well-recognized by both marketing scholars and practitioners. A significant volume of work has addressed the problem of dynamic marketing mix optimization assuming constant effectiveness of marketing instruments. However, the effectiveness of marketing communications varies over time for a variety of reasons. Moreover, due to f...