World Forage Import Market: Competitive Structure and Market Forces

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article was quite carefully prepared. It can be published after minor revision. In particular, a wider review of the literature would be worthwhile. In addition, minor formal and editorial corrections are necessary (in particular, the bibliographic description no. 2 is incorrect, the font is not uniform – lines 237, 249 and 303 versus line 282).

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

 

I have the following comments that I would like to share to improve the manuscript.

 

- The link between the theoretical framework and the conducted empirical tests is very weak. Please clarify in depth the links.

 

- The manuscript requires deeper clarification concerning the theoretical framework (section 2.1).

 

- Eq. (4): Why should the price be equal to marginal cost minus marginal revenue?

 

- Eq. (4) and (5): The Theta and Phi should be the parameters directly capturing the market power of the firms. What would be the relationship between these parameters and the empirical model?

 

- Eq. (6): The same clarification is required for Vk (the behavioral parameter of the Kth competing vendor).

 

- Once again, please clarify the relationship between Eqs. (1)-(7) and Eqs. (8) and (9).

 

- Forage production requires high fixed sunk costs (which is important to have the market power), but the theoretical framework does not consider such a feature. Please give more explanation with respect to such a nature of the industry.

 

- In the introduction, please clarify the new contribution and innovation of this study compared to previous literature (by citing some relevant and important papers dealing with the same topic and similar approaches).

 

- The manuscript focuses only on China, Japan and Korea, while Figure 1 shows the share of these countries is decreasing considerably during the last decade. Explaining recent forage import market changes would be interesting for general readers.

 

- The same comment applies for the forage export players in Figure 4.

 

- If there were changes in the demand elasticity for the studied countries, what would be the reason? Please explain the reasons as well as the policy implications for the forage import and export markets.

 

- The conducted tests are very limited to explain the world forage import market. The manuscript requires to explain the existing limitations and possible future research to improve the limitations.

Moderate editing is required.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The processed paper is well written and understandable. The forage trade is becoming to be more and more important and especially East and South Asian countries are under the constant pressure of increasing forage shortage to support continual growth of animal production. The processed paper provides an interesting overview of the current situation. The existing knowledge gap is explained and the importance of the paper is highlighted with respect to China, Korea and Japan.  The objectives of the paper are rational and the proposed methodology seems to be suitable. The analytical part and the results part of the paper are also acceptable. There two key problems reducing the quality of the proposed paper. The first, there is no relevant results discussion part. Individual results are not discussed with respect to other already published outputs. The uniqueness of individual results is not explained and the importance and final value of individual findings is also not explained/highlighted. The second, the final conclusion is extremely brief. The key findings are not well highlighted and their importance discussion is missing. It is not clear for whom the final results are important and how. The strengths and weaknesses of the paper and its results are not discussed. It is also missing any summary for future research activities. There are also a few typing and grammar mistakes. The paper should be revised before possible publishing.

There are also a few typing and grammar mistakes e.g. figure 2.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have made a more or less appropriate effort to address the comments and improve the paper.

Minor editing is required.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx