Competition between farmed and wild fish: the French sea bass and sea bream markets

Conference paper: Aquaculture is contributing at an increasing rate to world seafood supply. The interaction between fisheries and aquaculture is especially important for the seafood market where supply of wild and farmed fish can affect price dynamics. We examine market interactions in the French fresh sea bass and sea bream markets. We test for long term price parity between farmed and wild products for these two species, applying a bivariate cointegration approach to market delineation. We also conduct the Law of One Price (LOP) test between price series. Our data base consists of monthly domestic price series for fish purchased by French households from 2007 to 2012. Our empirical results show that the fresh fish markets for whole wild and farmed sea bream are partially integrated, while those for whole wild and farmed sea bass are not integrated. The substantially higher price for wild sea bass relative to farmed sea bass suggests that consumers may be more sensitive to seafood production processes in higher-value species.

Author(s)

Esther Régnier, Basak B. Bayramoglu

Date of publication
  • 2014
Keywords
  • Market interactions
  • Sea bass
  • Sea bream
  • Farmed fish
  • Wild fish
Title of the congress
  • 16th BIOECON Conference
Pages
  • 28
Version
  • 1