The impact of COVID-19 on agricultural market integration in Eastern Canada

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 and the resulting economic fallout, reports and official statistics have pointed to an unequivocal effect of the disease on almost all global economic activities, including the agricultural and agri-food sectors. The aim of this article is to use a price transmission approach in order to study the price relationships of agricultural commodities, including potatoes, corn, hogs, eggs, and chicken between regional Canadian markets and to verify their economic integration. The method of panel cointegration is applied to investigate the potential impact of the pandemic on the spatial integration of the provincial agricultural markets in Eastern Canada. It is found that these markets were fully integrated and efficient prior to COVID-19 restrictions. However, the statistical results show that travel restrictions and labor shortages represented trade barriers between the provinces, and they are likely the factors that impacted the price transmission mechanism, and consequently the markets became much less integrated. It is suggested that government policies should include actions that would manage future shocks to the agricultural commodity prices by accelerating the necessary transformations in the agri-food sector to make it more resilient and less vulnerable to future pandemics and other potential natural challenges.

Une analyse empirique pour étudier la relation entre la performance des étudiants et leur préférence de la méthode d’apprentissage en ligne

In this paper, we use statistical models to investigate the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on students’ academic performance in quantitative courses and the relationship between their preference of online education and their scores in statistics. Most Canadian universities, like other colleges and universities worldwide, switched to online learning and they suspended in-person teaching after the prevalence of the pandemic. We collected survey data from students at a Canadian university to assess the impact of the switch to online classes on their performance in statistics. The results show that better preforming students favor online learning, and they are perfectly fine with the experience. However, it is crucial to improve the method of online learning in the future and make it a more enjoyable and effective experience specifically for the less preforming students who still prefer in-class learning. © 2022. Academia (Greece). All Rights Reserved.