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8 - The Baking Enterprise: Efficiency versus Convenience

from Part II - Industrial Organization: The Producers in a Regulated Industry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2019

Jan de Vries
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Summary

The new regulatory regime introduced by the Dutch required detailed information about bakery operations and production costs. This chapter examines how regulators determined the constant costs of bakery operations. Regulatory practice was alert to constant costs, but could not accurately estimate fixed costs. Regulation faced a trade-off between seeking low costs via large-scale production and convenient access to bakeries, which required the survival of small bakeries. These trade-offs were handled differently in the urban west than in the more rural east of the country. Regulatory behavior is examined from the perspective of the theory of "regulatory capture" and the economic functions of guilds. Finally, the average earnings of bakeries are estimated in order to test whether regulation served to enrich the regulated, as predicted by the theory.
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Chapter
Information
The Price of Bread
Regulating the Market in the Dutch Republic
, pp. 180 - 223
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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