SEASONAL DEMAND FOR CARNATION AT THE FARM LEVEL

In Italy during the last ten years, carnation crop provided more than 60% of the cut-flowers marketed production value. In the period 1959–67 the carnation marketed production value is passed from 24.7 milliards L. it. to 51.9 milliards L. it. (at current price)(4). Its growing is spreading in the Southern Italy areas of flowers new production as Puglie, Sicilia and Sardegna. According to an IRVAM estimation, the carnation marketed production in value is distributed as follows: Liguria 72.4%, Toscana 12.9%, Lazio 3.2%, Campania 4.3%, Puglie 3.7%, Sicilia 1.7%, and Sardegna 1.6%. Furthermore, approximately, the whole supply at farm level is still passed through the production markets and, anyway, the open market prices are used as reference in the private contracts and direct buying.

Therefore, the knowledge of seasonal demand patterns at farm level can be of importance in production planning and orderly marketing of this crop, which continues to hold the leadership of Italian floriculture.

The major emphasis of this paper is the analysis of the seasonal variations in prices, by means of monthly data, in the S. Remo market.

If the fluctuations in price within a particular month depends solely on shifts in supply, then the price quantity observations will identify the price function as the equilibrium intersection locus between the stationary demand curve and the shifting supply curve (1).

In this study carnation supply was regarded as predeterminated, i. e., dependent on conditions other than current price; furthermore it was assumed that there are no stocks.

Therefore the price fluctuations of the carnation within a given month result from changes in the supply, rather than from modifications in demand.

Nevertheless, depending on the characteristics of this commodity, it was hypothesized that there were significant differences among months: differences may have existed either in the level of the function, in the responsiveness of farm price to quality marketed, or both.

The null hypotheses to test were: a) the level of the demand function is constant among months of the year, and b) the slopes of the demand function are constant by months within the year.