An Analysis of the International Meat Market

Abstract

In this article we study the international meat market (beef, pork and chicken meat) under the point of view of the values of production, exports and imports. The Tornqvist quantum indexes are computed for each of these dimensions. The countries are then evaluated according to alternative approaches – DEA Multicriteria and Principal Components Analysis applied to the correlation matrix, via the first principal component. The two competitive classifications are used, jointly, to identify homogeneous groups of importance relative to total business volume by means of a nonparametric cluster analysis. Additionally, the second principal component defines a contrast between production, imports and exports and identifies the most important countries in the buying dimension of the meat market. The identification of homogeneous groups in this dimension is also carried out by means of nonparametric cluster analysis. All classifications are validated and corrected via Discriminant Analysis.