This study aims to examine the economic impacts of phasing out enriched cages in Hungarian table egg production. An online questionnaire survey was conducted among 42 enriched cage egg producers and in-depth interviews were carried out with barn and aviary egg producers, as well as a company specialised in designing and implementing housing systems for laying hens, using economic and physical efficiency data for the year 2021 from egg producers. Economic situation was examined via a simulation model, which was based on on deterministic principles. The results indicate that aviary and barn housing systems exhibit lower physical efficiency and weaker economic indicators when compared to the enriched cage housing system. Aviaries and barns showed reduced egg production per hen (-7% and -12%, respectively), increased feed conversion ratio (FCR) (+17% and +24%), reduced labour efficiency (-40% in both cases), and increased mortality rate (+2.49 and +3.31 percentage points). Key determinants of unit gross margin alterations were found to be egg production per hen, the share of class ‘A’ eggs, FCR, and pullet acquisition cost. Aviary housing systems proved as profitable as enriched cage systems in terms of gross margin per egg, whereas barn housing systems were unprofitable based on 2021 data....

This paper presents an analysis of the potential socio-economic implications of the European Commission’s policy initiative to ban the use of cages in EU livestock farming, with a specific focus on conventional farrowing crates in the pig sector. Using the CAPRI (Common Agricultural Policy Regionalised Impact) tool, a multi-purpose comparative-static partial equilibrium modelling framework, the study examines two scenarios: an immediate phase-out of conventional farrowing crates by 2025 and a 10-year transition period until 2035. The simulation results indicate that the ban would lead to a significant decline in pork production in the EU, with production decreasing by 23.6% in the immediate phase-out scenario and by 8.4% in the 10-year transition scenario. The decline in production affects domestic demand and weakens the EU’s net trade position. However, the ban would also result in an increase in consumer prices and producer prices for pork, partly moderating the decline in profits for the pig sector. Moreover, the study highlights the interconnectedness of agricultural policies and the importance of a global assessment of their impact on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The simultaneous decline in EU pork exports and increase in EU pork imports trigger emission leakage: while GHG emissions from EU pork production...

Compared to most of the agricultural commodity markets in the European Union (EU), the pig market is less regulated and EU pig prices can be regarded as free market prices. It is thus an ideal economic research opportunity to investigate agricultural market integration and spatial price transmission mechanisms in the EU in the different Member States (MS). Depending on the geographical location, the decoupling of production costs from prices paid to pig farmers can jeopardise the fragile market balance between producers and processors. To retrospectively identify price setting trends, this paper examines how price return trends in the Hungarian pig sector are reflected in dynamic Diebold–Yilmaz spillover indices between 2007 and 2021. The results show that Hungary was mostly a net spillover receiver throughout the investigated period. Pairwise comparison of price spillovers to and from other MSs indicated that the German pig market had the strongest effect on the price forecast error variance in the Hungarian market, but transient interaction with other MS markets was also detected. To obtain a detailed time domain representation of the multivariate relationship between different MS’s price returns, our method considers an improved partial wavelet coherence (pwc) approach, which – to our knowledge – has...