A primer for engineers, giving an overview of key facets of international process economics. The text covers market evaluation, shows how to estimate capital and operating costs, tackles project profitability and how to plan capacity.

Process Industry Economics: Principles, Concepts and Applications, Second Edition, explores the fundamentals of market evaluation, capital and operating cost estimation, and profitability evaluation, along with their implications for process technology evaluation, project development and investment decisions. Sections cover time dependent technology evolution in process plants, including scale development, performance improvement in new and operating plants, and learning related to environmental, safety and sustainability assessments. Influences on capital investment decisions, including capacity planning and environmental considerations are explored and supported by case studies. Finally, the aspects of overall industry performance and drivers are discussed. - Outlines the basic principles of economic evaluation - Identifies the roles of engineering, scientific, commercial and management personnel in contributing to economic evaluation - Explores the interaction of economics with safety, environmental and sustainability criteria in project evaluation

This book presents a wealth of perspectives on studying the manufacturing end of food processing industries, with a special focus on regions with a low industrial base and multiple missing markets, institutional finance being the most prominent example. Positioning food processing within the industrial ecosystem, which includes entrepreneurs, policymakers, business consultants and associations, the study first considers three different trajectories: for developed economies, for national territories like India, and for sub-national regions like Bihar. In turn, it shows how these trajectories intertwine in two dimensions: the region and the sub-sector. Successfully completing food-processing projects in any of these trajectories requires the identification and development of appropriate product networks that link basic processed items with advanced ones through a chain of value addition. Moreover, the supply-side narrative presented here identifies two types of costs: physical and non-physical costs of operation. For trajectories with skewed firm sizes (“missing middle”) and missing markets, which can be found in Bihar, the latter costs matter just as much as the former in terms of entrepreneurship. While efficiency in operations is studied for selected sub-sectors in Bihar’s food processing to assess the main sources of inefficiency in minimizing the physical costs of operations, non-physical costs are studied using the construct of region-based counterfactual thinking (rCFT) and its relationship with the perception of risk for entrepreneurs. rCFT offers a new concept for understanding the mindset of the entrepreneur, in which the regional identity plays a significant role. The empirical content is based on a primary survey of food processing in Bihar. Additional policy questions, such as the choice between spatial collocation of food parks or cluster-based development of unique sub-sectors, are explored through an analysis of the policy network that supports entrepreneurship. Issues arising from the government’s policy choices, particularly vertically targeted industrial policies, can influence industrial outcomes and are particularly relevant for regions like Bihar. While policy evaluation for Bihar’s processed food industry yields insights on policy targeting for decision-makers in the government, examples of parallel narratives from global experiences in comparable regions shed new light on industrial development in processed food, which should be of interest to business practitioners, academic researchers and policymakers alike.

This book provides different facets of India's agro and food processing industry in both organised and unorganised segments. It brings forth the topical issues having potential to accelerate the pace of growth in its employment, investment and productivity and strive for improving the global competitiveness. Using advanced quantitative techniques, it brings new evidences on inter-sectoral (agriculture-industry-services) employment and production linkages, contractual arrangements through Farmer Producer Companies, and subcontracting in the processed food sector. It also throws light on India's comparative advantage in export of primary and processed food products. With rising per capita income, urbanisation, and changing food habits of people, India is increasingly striving to improve productivity and competitiveness in agriculture and manufacturing. A concerted policy focus to accelerate private investment in food processing, largely viewed as a sunrise industry, is expected to contribute to large scale job creation and external trade not only in the manufacturing but also in the agricultural sector. Keeping this in mind, considerable insights are featured in the book at the industry and firm levels due to a significant bearing of technological, tariffs and non-tariff barriers and labour regulations on their trade intensity, employment and efficiency. Containing perspectives from the top agriculture and industry economists in the country, the book will be very useful to researchers, academicians, trade analysts and policy makers.

This conference proceedings examines questions revolving around changes in, and challenges for, China’s agro-processing sector.

Economics of Food Processing in the United States aims to provide an economic overview of the food processing industries in the United States; to explore the firm-level implications of social, economic, technological, and institutional forces for selected food processing industries; and to uncover some of the implications for consumers, raw product producers, and the national economy of the major trends observed in food industries. The book begins by evaluating the major forces shaping demand, supply, prices, and trade in processed foods. It then considers major trends in technical processes; major forces in marketing, distribution, and structure; and major trends in regulation. The next few chapters explore these trends for five specific food processing industries, which represent major types of products processed: fruits and vegetables, meat, milk, grain and soybeans, and wine. After the specific industries have been examined, the final two chapters treat these industries in the context of the national and international economy. Students preparing for careers, researchers, and industry participants who study these firms and industries and the various approaches to solving their economic and management problems will benefit from the information in this volume and from its approach to presenting the dynamics of the food processing industries.

Presents a common vocabulary to facilitate the indexing, retrieval and exchange of development-related information.