The Mexican tortilla crisis of 2007: the impacts of grain-price increases on food-production chains
This article examines the case of the Mexican ‘tortilla crisis’ of 2007. Drawing on reviews of literature and the media, key-informant interviews, and secondary databases, the authors explore the response of the Mexican maize–tortilla chain to a price shock. Price increases should theoretically be passed on to the consumer as a progressively less significant percentage of the overall price of value-added food products. However, in Mexico, price increases were magnified along the maize–tortilla production chain. This was due largely to asymmetries among segments of the chain, which conditioned the responses of industrial-scale corporations and small-scale family businesses. This case study suggests that, in order to understand the impacts of price-shocks on poor consumers, more detailed, country-level analyses of market chains and price-transmission structures are needed.
Open Trade, Price Supports, and Regional Price Behavior in Mexican Maize Markets
Abstract We analyze wholesale maize prices in 12 Mexican markets from 1998 to 2010, a period when markets became more open to inter- and intranational trade. We ask how the influence of global and local forces on Mexican maize prices changed during this period. We also explore how the strength of global and local forces varies across maize-producing regions. In general, we expect the influence of global forces to increase and local forces to decrease as markets become more open. We find that the influence of global forces does vary over the study period and, counter to expectation, is the highest at the beginning and middle of the period rather than at the end. This result suggests that even under less open market conditions, buyers and sellers were still following global price signals. In contrast, the influence of local forces follows expectation and decreases over time. However, the estimated pattern of response is not uniform across various maize-producing regions. Taken together, our results suggest that opening agricultural markets can result in regionally distinct outcomes and counterintuitive price behavior.
Institutionalizing Corporate Social Responsibility: A Study of Provisions and Implications of Indian Companies Act 2013
Abstract 
The spotlight of this chapter is to understand the connection between public policy and corporate social responsibility (CSR); in other words – the institutionalization of CSR. What is the role of the government for setting standards and mandating for ensuring responsibility? The emerging accepted wisdom in policy and academic circles is that many sustainability solutions are likely to result from institutional (i.e., governance) reform. A perceptive on CSR evolving as an institution of broader societal governance appears as a promising opportunity to delve into at a point in time when conventional rules, actors, and markets that steered the global economy demonstrate to be undergoing credibility crisis. CSR therefore must be considered within the wider field of institutions for governing the corporation and the economy. This chapter is exploratory as it dwells into theoretical underpinning of emerging mandatory CSR as well as provides empirical mapping of corporate responses to the new enacted legislation. The CSR analysis presented is based on a content analysis of the information contained in the annual reports of some prominent companies, government documents, audits reports, companies websites, and newspaper reports, which will provide us evidences of responses of corporates toward the CSR provisions.