A Literature Review of Agribusiness Companies in Global Bourses: Perspectives Towards the Development of an Agribusiness Index in the Philippines

With the shift of orientation of the Philippines from farming into a thriving agribusiness-driven sector, the country’s economic growth became robust in the recent years. Despite the increasing importance of the agribusiness sector, there has been little research on the contribution of the sector to the Philippine financial market. In this paper, an attempt is made to assess the importance of the agribusiness sector in the stock market by evaluating the performance of the sector in other bourses. The study primarily used a descriptive research design in evaluating the agribusiness companies listed in various stock markets outside the Philippines. Results indicated that in the global context, several researches have been conducted that studied the benefits of agribusiness stocks as diversification tools. In the Asian context, there were researchers who attempted to assess the performance of agribusiness firms. However, research gaps still exist, especially in areas relating to the development of an agribusiness index in the ASEAN context. With various benefits as well as emerging opportunities seen in the sector in the Philippines and in other countries, such an agribusiness index is deemed necessary as this serves a two-fold purpose of measuring the performance of agribusiness stocks and highlights the relevance of the sector in the Philippine financial market.