| With urbanization and the rise of a middle class, many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are undergoing rapid food system change at all levels of the food value chain. However, there is relatively little known in the research community about the nature of this change at the post-farm level. The purpose of this dissertation, titled Milling Service Markets, Value Chain Coordination, and Food Attribute Values: Three Essays on the Post-Farm Food System in Tanzania is to help fill this gap by exploring issues surrounding technology channel access for food processors, coordination of food products between processors and retailers, and the value of final food product attributes.;In the first essay we use the data from a primary survey of maize flour processing firms in Dar es Salaam to explore the role of milling service markets in providing access to milling technology. We use a utility of profit maximizing framework with key explanatory variables falling in the categories of assets and human capital, perceived risk, and transaction costs. Our findings suggest that the use of milling service markets is associated with a lower asset threshold to entry, lower economies of scope, higher perceived market risk, and lower transaction costs of use.;In the second essay we use the same miller data, and data from a primary survey of food retailers in Dar es Salaam and Arusha, to explore market coordination between food processors and food retailers. We use a transaction cost economics (TCE) framework to estimate the correlates of value chain integration from both the processor and retailer point of view, and the correlates of contract use from the processor point of view. Some findings are that (a) at least medium perceived market risk and product perishability (a proxy for temporal asset specificity) are positively associated with (mainly verbal) contract use, but other measures of asset specificity are not significantly associated, and (b) perceived market risk and firm clustering are negatively associated with value chain integration. We argue that a common theme is that wholesalers and traders play a pivotal role in coordinating activity with the food system.;In the third essay we use data from the retail survey to estimate the marginal value of food product attributes using a hedonic price analysis, comparing across retail outlet types and the two cities. We find that counter to other recent findings in the literature, traditional retail outlets are generally more price competitive than supermarkets for maize flour products, except for top brands. We also find that products tended to be more expensive in Dar es Salaam than in Arusha, suggesting that there may be decreasing productivity returns to population growth, in addition to a positive income effect. |
