Price Caps, Retail Margins and Pork Price Transmission in Hungary – new research article by Imre Fertő and Szilárd Podruzsik has published in Agribusiness journal

This paper examines vertical price transmission in the Hungarian pork-leg supply chain during a period of high food inflation and intensive retail-market intervention. Using weekly data from 2021w7 to 2026w19, we distinguish two directly linked market pairs: producer-to-retail procurement and retail procurement-to-consumer. Baseline ARDL estimates show strong upstream pass-through, with a long-run elasticity of 0.785 from producer to procurement prices, but much weaker downstream pass-through, with an elasticity of 0.275 from procurement to net consumer prices. Policy-regime estimates, supported by Newey-West HAC-robust inference, indicate that the food-price-cap-only period coincided with sharply compressed downstream pass-through, while upstream transmission remained substantial. Nonlinear ARDL and threshold diagnostics do not support a robust long-run asymmetry interpretation. The findings suggest that incomplete pork-leg price transmission in Hungary was concentrated mainly at the consumer-facing retail-pricing stage, rather than reflecting uniformly weak transmission along the entire supply chain.