direct payments spatial competition and farm survival in norway we argue that farm survival is influenced by neighboring farmers characteristics and in particular by the direct payments neighboring farmers receive the article shows empirically that these interdependencies are crucial for an assessment of the effects of direct payments on farm survival using spatially explicit farm level data for nearly all norwegian farms a spatial probit model is estimated to explain farm survival from 1999 to 2009 controlling for spatial farm interdependence we show that ignoring spatial interdependencies between farms leads to a substantial overestimation of the effects of direct payments on farm survival to our knowledge this article is the first attempt to empirically analyze the importance of neighboring interdependencies for the effects of direct payments on farm survival

socio economic characteristics and the effect of taxation as a health policy instrument abstract this paper analyses the quantitative effects of using economic instruments in health policy on the basis of price elasticities calculated from estimated demand systems the nutritional effects of various taxation schemes are compared for households in different age groups and social classes focusing on the consumption of saturated fats fibre and sugar it is generally found that the impact of price instruments is stronger for lower social classes than in other groups of the population with regard to age groups it is mostly the youngest that decrease their demand for saturated fat in response to price changes while it is mostly the middle aged who exhibit price responsiveness in their demand for sugar these groups are however not considered as key target groups for dietary regulation thus tax instruments may be effective in improving diets on average but the design of the instruments and the targeting of vulnerable groups with special needs should be done with care it should be noted that a tax on a single nutrient or food may have undesired effects on the demand for other food components though this may be avoided by introducing taxes subsidies on several food products simultaneously

the relative forecasting performance of the divisia and simple sum monetary aggregates this paper provides direct evidence on the forecasting performance of the divisia monetary aggregates relative to the traditional simple sum monetary aggregates it is shown that forecasts of u s real gdp from a four variable vector autoregression var are most accurate when a divisia aggregate is used rather than a simple sum aggregate particularly at broad levels of aggregation further the two m1 aggregates relative to the broader aggregates are superior predictors of the gdp deflator with a slight edge going to divisia m1 over simple sum m1

the role of farming experience on the adoption of agricultural technologies evidence from smallholder farmers in uganda abstractthis article investigates the relationship between adoption of and experience with agricultural technologies we use both non parametric and parametric estimations on data from rural farmers in uganda we find an inverted u relationship between adoption of and experience with agricultural technologies in banana coffee and maize this suggests that farming experience is useful in early stages of adoption of a given technology when farmers are still testing its potential benefits which later determine its retention or disadoption over time thus gradual advances in technology development and continuous retraining of farmers are essential for sustainable adoption of agricultural technologies for some crops

the demand for assets through a low interest rate environment asset demand is important in many areas of economics to investigate this we estimate a globally flexible dynamic fourier asset demand specification and calculate morishima elasticities of substit

the effect of using consumption taxes on foods to promote climate friendly diets the case of denmark abstract agriculture is responsible for 17 35 of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions with livestock production contributing by approximately 18 22 of global emissions due to high monitoring costs and low technical potential for emission reductions a tax on consumption may be a more efficient policy instrument to decrease emissions from agriculture than a tax based directly on emissions from production in this study we look at the effect of internalising the social costs of greenhouse gas emissions through a tax based on co 2 equivalents for 23 different foods furthermore we compare the loss in consumer surplus and the changed dietary composition for different taxation scenarios in the most efficient scenario we find a decrease in the carbon footprint from foods for an average household of 2 3 8 8 at a cost of 0 15 1 73 dkk per kg co 2 equivalent whereas the most effective scenario led to a decrease in the carbon footprint of 10 4 19 4 but at a cost of 3 53 6 90 dkk per kg co 2 equivalent the derived consequences for health show that scenarios where consumers are not compensated for the increase in taxation level lead to a decrease in the total daily amount of kj consumed whereas scenarios where the consumers are compensated lead to an increase most scenarios lead to a decrease in the consumption of saturated fat compensated scenarios leads to an increase in the consumption of added sugar whereas uncompensated scenarios lead to almost no change or a decrease generally the results show a low cost potential for using consumption taxes to promote climate friendly diets

learning about a new technology pineapple in ghana this paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new agri cultural technology in ghana we use unique data on farmers communication patterns to define each individual s information neighborhood conditional on many potentially confounding variables we find evidence that farmers adjust their inputs to align with those of their information neighbors who were surpris ingly successful in previous periods the relationship of these input adjustments to experience further indicates the presence of social learning in addition applying the same method to input choices for another crop of known technol ogy correctly indicates an absence of social learning effects jel d83 013 033 q16

the geography of market failure edge effect externalities and the location and production patterns of organic farming abstract perceptions of increasing land scarcity and negative impacts of chemical based agriculture have led to increasing concern regarding the sustainability of food systems incompatible production processes among farming systems may lead to spatial conflicts and production losses between neighboring farms and the magnitude of such losses may depend not only on the scale of each activity but also on patterns of land use such conflicts can be classified as edge effect externalities spatial externalities whose marginal impacts decrease as distance from the border generating the negative impact increases this paper tests the hypothesis that edge effect externalities have influenced the location and production patterns of certified organic farms using data from california central valley certified organic farmers using concepts from landscape ecology and spatial statistics we investigate difference in parcel geometry and surrounding land uses between organic and non organic parcels using a generalized method of moments gmm spatially autoregressive econometric model we demonstrate that both parcel geometry and surrounding land uses influence the probability of a given parcel being certified organic we conclude with suggestions for policies to encourage development of organic farming regions

the changing empirical definition of money some estimates from a model of the demand for money substitutes interest bearing checkable deposits are examined to test whether they should be included in measures of the u s money stock both divisia and traditional simple sum aggregates are constructed on the basis of tests for weak separability in a model of the demand for financial assets using nonparametric demand analysis we find that several groups of assets are compatible with aggregation theory we find empirical support for a narrow measure consisting of the components of current mia in tests based on a st louis equation and in terms of controllability a divisia aggregate performs better than the simple sum mia measure

women s schooling home teaching and economic growth the hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution india estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution

can peers improve agricultural revenue crop revenues vary greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood even after controlling for factors including input use technology adoption and other agro climatic factors one hypothesis that may explain the variation in outcomes among farmers is differential access to information through peers using a household survey from india containing detailed information about personal relationships we estimate peer effects on cash crop revenue using a novel spatial econometric technique to control for reflection our results show that 60 of farmers revenue is explained by peers peer effects are particularly large in pesticide use and in the cultivation of a new crop however peer effects in input expenditures and land allocation cannot fully explain the variation in revenue implying peers may also associate with management negotiation and marketing we find that peer effects are significant among farmers self reported peers especially among those peers who are farmers main advisors for agricultural matters although caste based networks both within the same and in adjacent villages are important their effect is smaller than that of self reported peer networks we empirically rule out that our effects are driven by other factors such as geographically correlated unobservables farmers following a lead farmer or economies of scale our findings speak to both the potential and the limitations of peers as sources of agricultural information and highlight the need for future research about how to best integrate peers into agricultural extension

farm level fertilizer demand in java a meta production function approach this paper models seed variety choice and the demand for variable inputs as jointly determined by profit maximizing cultivators the approach parallels that of hayami and ruttan who postulated that changes in the output fertilizer price ratio induce movements along a meta fertilizer response function the envelope of individual variety specific response surfaces ignoring the possibility of seed variety switching leads to underestimates of fertilizer demand elasticities in addition estimation with samples reflecting a single seed variety may involve serious selection bias a two stage procedure which adjusts for selectivity bias is used to estimate the model with farm level data from java

toward optimal meat consumption external cost from meat consumption raises an issue of possible government mechanisms toward mitigation economic theory provides a framework for determining the optimal set of mechanisms considering the associated benefits and costs such a theoretical development rests on consumers responsiveness to alternative mechanisms considering two mechanisms a pigouvian tax and green label education yields tandem theoretical optimal government mechanisms populating this theoretical model with empirically derived elasticities and other parameters provides an application results indicate education alone will likely not yield a high social optimal level of mitigation instead if external costs warrant government mechanisms a pigouvian tax will be required to move consumption toward a socially optimal state

spatial interactions in multiple use forestry and substitution and wealth effects for the single stand abstract forestry models often ignore spatial relationships between forest stands this paper isolates the effects of stand interactions in multiple use forestry through a straightforward extension of the single stand model effects of stand interactions decompose into wealth and substitution effects and may cause time varying patterns of resource use for a forest stand simulations illustrate that a stand s role even in steady state may alternate an emphasis on timber with an emphasis on nontimber optimal management plans differ substantially depending on whether the manager values nonmarket goods from neighboring stands the model offers insights for improving heuristic forest level optimization models in current usage

who gets the goods a general equilibrium perspective on food aid in mozambique abstract we employ a computable general equilibrium approach to examine the effects of alternative food aid distribution schemes for drought response food aid to mozambique alternative schemes have very distinct impacts on household welfare and prices compared with monetization of food aid by government direct distribution to households by population shares strongly benefits rural households even assuming that government cannot target food aid strictly at drought stricken rural people our results indicate that when improving household welfare is the primary goal of the food aid direct distribution of food aid to households is preferred

risk schooling and the choice of seed technology in developing countries a meta profit function approach the determinants of rice seed variety choice are studied in a framework in which cultivator s variety specific profit risk preferences uncertainty and schooling affect variety choice the econometric model takes the form of a simultaneous equation switching regimes model with random profit functions the meta profit function adoption of high yielding varieties in indonesia is found to be positively associated with profitability likelihood of flooding quality of irrigation conditional on relative profit and availability of credit and negatively associated with likelihood of drought and land wealth schooling significantly affects variety specific profit and input demand but not variety choice the spread of high yielding rice varieties hyv s has ushered in an era of agricultural transformation in asia in indonesia the adoption of these new seed varieties contributed importantly to a spectacular increase in indonesia s rice production over the last decades rice output grew at an annual rate of 4 percent during the 1970 s and almost 6 percent in the 1980 s while experimental plots have demonstrated that under optimal conditions the mean yield of hyv rice far exceeds that of traditional varieties tv s many asian cultivators do not plant hyv s in indonesia the hyv revolution has been particularly slow to spread to many areas outside of java and partly as a consequence the distribution of the gains derived from hyv s has been uneven accounting for differences in adoption rates is therefore of some interest differences in prices and fixed factors of production are one explanation for inter farm differences in seed variety adoption if cultivator s seed technology choices are the result of profit maximizing behavior then varietal choice will depend on the determinants of profit variable factor prices the prices of varietyspecific output and the level of fixed factors including the agro climatic environment different profit functions exist for each variety reflecting the differences in their biological technology if seed variety choice is itself part of the cultivators profit maximization problem then there exists a single profit function the metaprofit function which treats variety choice as a variable input and from which all

a comparison of nonparametric tests of weak separability for annual and quarterly data on consumption leisure and money among the most fundamental assumptions made in economics are utility maximization and the separability of the arguments in the representative consumer s utility function these assumptions are important for theoretical and empirical applications of economics in this article we present results from nonparametric tests of these assumptions of consumer behavior we find that utility maximization generally obtains with either annual or quarterly per capita data on consumption goods leisure and relatively liquid monetary assets annual data on consumption goods leisure and all monetary assets are consistent with utility maximization there is some evidence in support of using partial adjustment models when estimating quarterly data models of the demand for monetary assets further annual data on consumption goods and leisure and on liquid monetary assets meet the necessary and sufficient conditions for weak separability these results support the notion of a monetary aggregate more broadly based than cu

indian farmers valuation of yield distributions will poor farmers value pro poor seeds abstract potential poverty traps among the rural poor suggest a need to reduce poor farmers vulnerability by stabilizing crop yields and limiting yield losses advances in biotechnology will help address this need directly with crops that tolerate climate fluctuation or resist biotic stresses evaluating ex ante how farmers will value these pro poor seeds is important for delivery design but also challenging this paper describes an experimental economic approach to understanding farmers valuation of such seeds using data from a survey and experiment i assess indian farmers valuation of changes in the mean variance and skewness of payoff distributions these farmers value increases in expected value but seem indifferent about higher moment changes in payoff distributions farmer traits such as wealth and risk exposure affect their valuation of these changes only mildly while various limitations to the experimental approach must qualify practical implications of these findings the experiment demonstrates the viability of conducting valuation experiments with open ended questions in developing countries

productivity and land enhancing technologies in northern ethiopia health public investments and sequential adoption the adoption of more efficient farming practices and technologies that enhance agricultural productivity and improve environmental sustainability is instrumental for achieving economic growth food security and poverty alleviation in sub saharan africa our research examines the interaction between public investments community health and adoption of productivity and land enhancing technologies by households in the northern ethiopian state of tigray agricultural technology adoption decisions are modeled as a sequential process where the timing of choices can matter we find that time spent sick and opportunity costs of caring for sick family members are significant factors in adoption sickness through its impact on household income and labor allocation decisions for healthcare and other activities significantly reduces the likelihood of technology adoption our findings suggest that agencies working to improve agricultural productivity and land resource conservation should consider not only the financial status of potential adopters but also their related health situation

effects of an environmental tax on meat and dairy consumption in sweden this study evaluated the environmental impacts of introducing an environmental tax on meat and dairy consumption in sweden three meat products beef pork and chicken four dairy products milk fermented products cream and cheese and four pollutants generating environmental damage greenhouse gases ghg nitrogen ammonia and phosphorus were included in the analysis the unit tax applied corresponded to between 8 9 and 33 3 of the respective price per kg product in 2009 consumer response to the tax was calculated by econometric estimates of the almost ideal demand system aids for meat and dairy products using per capita consumption data and prices the results indicated relatively inelastic own price elasticities and high income elasticities for all meat products and slightly lower for dairy products simultaneous introduction of a tax on all seven products decreased emissions of ghg nitrogen ammonia and phosphorus from the livestock sector by up to 12

risky monetary aggregates for the uk and us abstract we extend the scope of monetary aggregation beyond capital certain assets that make up central bank data sets and identify groups of assets that form monetary aggregates composed of both capital certain and risky capital uncertain assets we construct monetary aggregates for the us and uk using a superlative index and relax a key assumption of the consumption capital asset pricing model ccapm a one year planning horizon by using forecasted returns on risky assets our new risky monetary aggregates perform well in var tests we recommended exploring risky assets as providers of liquidity services in future research on this topic

assessing the distributional effects of carbon taxes on food inequalities and nutritional insights in france abstract a carbon tax on food could contribute to emissions mitigation and act as a strong signal to economic actors however tax regressivity is a major disadvantage this study addressed equity issues using several means first reallocation proposals in a revenue neutral approach of several emission based carbon taxation scenarios at the consumption level of food are included second these proposals distributional incidence was developed evaluating the role of carbon pricing in policy impacts using a carbon based approach differing emission potentials of food groups highlight the relevance of using proteins as a tax base to redirect animal to plant sources in a diet thus a scenario of taxing foods rich in animal proteins and subsidizing those rich in plant proteins was constructed scanner data of french households in 2010 were analyzed several ghg emission indicators and related nutritional impacts such as diet quality scores and a shift from animal to plant proteins were evaluated using individual changes in food expenditure distributional effects based on continuous distribution and inequality indexes were measured allowing for a discussion of policy options of a targeted vs nontargeted tax and a revenue neutral approach in the food sector

does food aid have disincentive effects on local production a general equilibrium perspective on food aid in ethiopia this paper examined impacts of food aid on domestic food production employing a computable general equilibrium modelling technique and using data from ethiopia the simulation experiments have shown that food aid has unambiguous disincentive effects on domestic food production the removal of food aid caused a modest increase in food prices but this stimulated food production employment and income generation effects of the latter outweighed the adverse effect of the former consequently the removal of food aid led to improvements in aggregate household welfare contrary to some concerns in the food aid literature that any reduction in food aid would hurt the poor the simulation experiments suggested that actually poor rural households and urban wage earners are the ones who benefit most in absence of food aid but entrepreneurs are more likely to encounter a marginal welfare decline we have distinguished between in kind food aid and cash equivalent transfers in order to isolate the disincentives that in kind transfers would make to domestic production from those that are related to household purchasing power problem the expansionary effect of removing food aid becomes significantly larger when it is accompanied by cash equivalent payments because the latter would provide demand side stimulus to agriculture while the removal of in kind transfers would stimulate supply side with the supply and demand side effects reinforcing each other in our modelling framework the only adverse effect would be a modest deterioration in the external current account because the expansionary effects of food aid would cause imports to rise but exports to fall

carbon leakage and limited efficiency of greenhouse gas taxes on food products abstract greenhouse gas emission ghge taxes on food products have recently been proposed as means to help reduce agricultural emissions numerous authors have calculated potential ghge reductions in case such a tax was implemented in certain countries or regions they did however assume a reduced production of ghge intense foods equal to the decline in demand induced by the tax this omits however possible increases of net exports that might offset such a demand reduction herein the market dynamic behind this so called emission leakage is explained and its effect quantified for a greenhouse gas tax in the european union we use the european forest and agricultural sector optimization model for the quantitative analysis and simulate a greenhouse gas tax on all food products based on their individual emission levels the partial equilibrium model covers all world regions and hence the tax s effects on international trade of agricultural commodities can be examined it was found that 43 of the greenhouse gas reduction indicted by a domestic consumption reduction is lost through emission leakage this already includes the mitigating effects of a production shift from inefficient to efficient producers that is another consequence of increased exports from the european union a greenhouse gas emission tax on food products is hence much less efficient than previously proposed if it is not introduced globally or trade is not restricted

learning by doing and learning from others human capital and technical change in agriculture household level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high yielding seed varieties hyvs associated with the green revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers the estimates indicate that i imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption ii this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased iii own experience and neighbors experience with hyvs significantly increased hyv profitability and iv farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions

non parametric tests of consumer behaviour the neoclassical model of consumer behaviour postulates that a consumer s choice behaviour can be described as deriving from utility maximization subject to a budget constraint one is then naturally led to ask what this model implies about observed behaviour this question has been addressed from two quite distinct approaches the first approach originating in the work of slutsky 1915 and antonelli 1886 derives necessary and sufficient conditions involving the derivatives of the demand functions the second approach originating in the work of samuelson 1938 1947 1948 derives algebraic conditions on the demand functions implied by maximizing behaviour

bayesian spatial probit estimation a primer and an application to hyv rice adoption increasingly spatial econometric methods are becoming part of the standard toolkit of applied researchers in agricultural environmental and development economics nonetheless applications in discrete choice settings remain few and despite its appeal applications of the bayesian paradigm in these settings are still fewer we provide a primer to the bayesian spatial probit with the objective of making accessible to non users a class of iterative estimation methods that have become fairly routine in bayesian circles offer an extremely powerful addition to applied researchers toolkits and are essential in bayesian implementation of spatial econometric models we demonstrate the methods and apply them to estimate the neighbourhood effect in high yielding variety hyv adoption among bangladeshi rice producers we estimate the strength of this relationship using a standard spatial probit model and compare the policy conclusions with and without the neighbourhood effect included

the impact of tax reforms designed to encourage healthier grain consumption in this paper we simulate the effects of tax reforms aimed at encouraging healthier grain consumption we use a rich data set on household grain consumption in 2003 from the market research institute gfk sweden combined with information on the nutritional content of the consumption we estimate behavioral parameters which are used to simulate the impact on the average household of tax reforms entailing either a subsidy on commodities particularly rich in fiber or a subsidy of the fiber density in grain products our results suggest that to direct the fiber intake towards nutritional recommendations reforms with a substantial impact on consumer prices are required regardless of the type of subsidy implemented the increase in the intake of fiber is accompanied by unwanted increases in nutrients that are often overconsumed fat salt and sugar funding the subsidies by taxing these nutrients or less healthy commodities helps to counteract such developments

the system wide impact of healthy eating assessing emissions and economic impacts at the regional level abstract encouraging consumers to shift their diets towards a lower meat lower calorie alternative has been the focus of food and health policies across the world the economic impacts of such changes on regions have been less widely examined but are likely to be significant especially where agricultural and food production activities are important for the region in this study we use a multi sectoral modelling framework to examine the environmental and economic impacts of such a dietary change and illustrate this using a detailed model for scotland we find that if household food and drink consumption follows healthy eating guidelines it would reduce both scotland s footprint and territorial emissions and yet may be associated with positive economic impacts generating a double dividend for both the environment and the economy the economic impact however depends critically upon how households use the income previously spent on higher meat higher calorie diets furthermore the likely but not modelled benefits to health suggest the potential for a triple dividend

exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss consumer s surplus is a widely used tool in applied welfare economics both economic theorists and cost benefit analysis often use consumer s surplus despite its somewhat dubious reputation the basic idea is to evaluate the value to a consumer or his willingness to pay for a change in price of a good from say pricep to pricep because price changes affect consumer welfare an evaluation of this effect is often a key input to public policy decisions yet consumer s surplus is probably the most controversial of widely used economic concepts both paul samuelson and ian little conclude that the economics profession would be better off without it it is my feeling of the situation that substantial agreement exists on the correct quantities to be measured the amount the consumer would pay or would need to be paid to be just as well off after the price change as he was before the price change the quantities correspond to john hicks compensating variation measures an alternative measure which takes ex post price change utility as the basis of comparison is hicks equivalent variation the controversy arises in the measurement of these quantities the usual measurement procedure is to use the area to the left of the marshallian market demand curve between two price levels jules dupuit originated this measure of welfare change and alfred marshall and hicks derived appropriate conditions for its use the primary condition for the area to the left of the demand curve to correspond to the compensating variation is to have constant marginal utility of income marshall gave this condition and if it holds the same quantity will be derived as the area to the left of the compensated hicksian demand curve this area to the left of the compensated demand curve is exactly what the compensating variation and equivalent variation measure thus the constant marginal utility of income is a sufficient condition for marshallian consumer s surplus to be equal to hicks consumer s surplus in this case arnold harberger s plea to use the welfare triangle as one half times the product of the price change times the quantity change to measure deadweight loss corresponds to the correct theoretical amount of welfare change in a recent paper robert willig derives bounds for the percentage difference between the correct measure of either the compensating or equivalent variation and the marshallian measure derived form the market demand curve his bounds which depend on the income elasticity of demand for the single good in the region of price change being considered as well as the proportion of the consumer s income spent on the good demonstrate that the marshallian consumer s surplus is often a good approximation to hicks consumer s surplus the fact that the proportion of the consumer s income spent matters as well as the income elasticity was first pointed out by harold hotelling willig contends that the approximation error will be less than the errors involved in estimating the demand curve thus he hopes to remove the need for apology that applied economists often need to give to theorists who remark on the inappropriateness of using marshallian consumer s surplus to measure welfare change however in this paper i show that for the case primarily considered by willig of a single price change which is also the situation in which consumer s surplus is often used in applied work no approximation is necessary professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research associate national bureau of economic research i would like to thank peter diamond erwin diewert daniel mcfadden robert merton robert solow hal varian joel yellin and the referees for help and comments research support from the national science foundation is acknowledged the reason that we still have two rather than one of samuelson s six measures of consumer s surplus arises from an index number problem of the correct basis for the welfare comparison i will give both measures but plan to concentrate on the compensating variation

bounding an economic monetary aggregate under nonhomothetic preferences we construct nonparametric bounds on true quantity indexes for the realistic case of nonhomothetic preferences these bounds do not require assumptions about the form of the underlying aggregator function we construct these bounds using monetary assets that meet necessary conditions for the existence of an aggregate we find that a tornqvist index of these monetary assets falls within the nonparametric bounds on true quantity indexes almost all of the time whereas a simple sum of these monetary assets falls outside these bounds more than one third of the time

local choice of property taxation evidence from norway fiscal competition may influence the design of tax systems the tax competition literature has concentrated on mobility of tax base and tax levels while we turn the attention to the political decision making system and the determination of tax structure in the norwegian setting local governments make a discrete choice whether to have property tax the local choice is investigated in an econometric model allowing for yardstick competition our results indicate that yardstick competition explains the distinct geographic pattern in local property taxation observed grants have no effect on the propensity to have property taxation consistent with the flypaper effect the main methodological challenge handled concerns spatial interaction with discrete choice

spatial externalities in agriculture empirical analysis statistical identification and policy implications summary spatial externalities can affect economic welfare and landscape pattern by linking farm returns on adjoining parcels of land while policy can be informed by research that documents spatial externalities statistically quantifying the presence of externalities from landscape pattern is insufficient for policy guidance unless the underlying cause of the externality can be identified as positive or negative this article provides a springboard for empirical research by examining the underlying structure social environmental interactions and statistical identification strategies for the analysis and the quantification of agricultural spatial externalities that are derived from observations of landscape change the potential for original policy treatments of agricultural spatial externalities in development and environment outcomes is highlighted

econometric estimation of producers risk attitudes general methods are proposed for the identification and econometric estimation of the parameters of the distribution of risk attitudes in a producer population the proposed methods also provide the basis for the development of statistical tests of model specification and of behavioral hypotheses econometric risk attitude estimation is shown to be possible under less restrictive conditions than previously believed a moment based version of the general model is applied to indian data and the econometrically estimated risk attitudes are presented and compared to experimental results for a similar group of producers

wealth weather risk and the composition and profitability of agricultural investments despite the growing evidence that farmers in low income environments are risk averse there has been little empirical evidence on the importance of risk in shaping the actual allocation of production resources among farmers differentiated by wealth the authors use panel data on investments in rural india to examine how the composition of productive and nonproductive asset holdings varies across farmers with different levels of total wealth and across farmers facing different degrees of weather risk income variability is a prominent feature of the experience of rural agents in low income countries the authors report evidence based on measures of rainfall variability that the agricultural investment portfolio behavior of farmers in such settings reflects risk aversion due evidently to limitations on consumption soothing mechanisms such as crop insurance or credit markets the authors results suggest that uninsured weather risk is a significant cause of lower efficiency and lower average incomes a one standard deviation decrease in weather risk measured by the standard deviation of the timing of the rainy season would raise average profits by up to 35 percent among farmers in the lowest wealth quartile moreover rainfall variability induces a more unequal distribution of average incomes for a given distribution of wealth wealthier farmers are willing to absorb significant risk without giving up profits to reduce production risk smaller farmers have to invest their limited wealth in ways that reduce their exposure to risk at the cost of lower profit rates the authors found that at high levels of rainfall variability differences in rates of profit per unit of agricultural assets were similar across classes of wealth but over the sample range of rainfall variability these rates of profit were always higher for the poorer farmers than for the wealthier ones suggesting that the disadvantages of small farmers in risk diffusion are more than offset by their labor cost advantage

a welfare measure of consumer vulnerability to rising prices of food imports in the uae abstract the recent and expected continuing rise in food prices has re ignited concern and discussion in the united arab emirates about the country s vulnerability to food supply shocks defining vulnerability as the compensating variation relative to household income we find that although uae households in the lowest income quintile spend on food on average less than a quarter of what households in the highest income quintile spend the former are 3 5 times more vulnerable to rising prices of food imports than the latter

admissible monetary aggregates for the euro area we use the fleissig and whitney fleissig a r whitney g a 2003 a new pc based test for varian s weak separability conditions journal of business and economics statistics 21 1 133 144 weak separability test to determine admissible levels of monetary aggregation for the euro area we find that the euro area monetary assets in m2 and m3 are weakly separable and construct admissible divisia monetary aggregates for these assets we show that real growth of the admissible divisia aggregates enters the euro area is curve positively and significantly for the period from 1980 to 2005 out of sample we show that divisia m2 and m3 appear to contain useful information for forecasting euro area inflation

welfare effects of maize technologies in marginal and high potential regions of kenya this paper describes the findings of a study that used a multi market model to assess the potential impact of improved maize technologies on the welfare of various types of rural and urban households in kenya the modelling results indicate that technologies developed for high potential regions are likely to have more profound aggregate impacts on maize production and lead to greater reductions in import demand if prices are controlled or maize prices if maize prices are flexible technology adoption in high potential regions is likely to have substantially greater positive impacts on aggregate real incomes but inferior income distributional outcomes compared to technology adoption in marginal regions

the optimal level of monetary aggregation in this paper i have three objectives 1 to describe the aggregation theoretic procedure for selecting the optimal monetary aggregates 2 to survey the available empirical evidence for information on the optimal aggregates and 3 to describe the procedures that should be followed to complete a redefinition of the monetary aggregates although all of the federal reserve board s current official aggregates are rejected as targets some newer aggregates are found to be substantially preferable to the official aggregates the board s staff recently completed the official redefinition of its monetary aggregates in a manner largely unrelated to aggregation and index number theory my own research in recent years has sought to remedy that shortcoming except for monetary aggregates most of the data provided by governmental agencies are constructed in accordance with aggregation and index number theory since aggregation theory can be applied to monetary aggregation 1 i constructed new monetary aggregates that are consistent with the economic theory 2 recently the empiri

spatial patterns of organic agriculture adoption evidence from honduras in low potential agricultural areas like the honduran hillsides characterized by soil degradation and erosion organic agriculture can provide a means to break the downward spiral of resource degradation and poverty we use original survey data to analyze the factors influencing the decision to convert to organic agriculture previous studies have emphasized the role of spatial patterns in the diffusion and adoption of agricultural technologies in general and organic agriculture in particular these spatial patterns can result from a variety of underlying factors in this article we test various potential explanations including the availability of information in the farmer s neighborhood social conformity concerns and perceived positive external effects of the adoption decision in a spatially explicit adoption model we find that farmers who believe to act in accordance with their neighbors expectations and with greater availability of information in their neighborhood network are more likely to adopt organic agriculture furthermore perceived positive productivity spillovers to neighboring plots decrease the probability of adoption we discuss the implications of our findings for the dissemination of sustainable agricultural technologies in low potential agricultural areas in developing countries

divisia aggregation and substitutability among monetary assets in this paper the authors estimate the degree of substitutability among the services of money checkable deposits savings deposits and time deposits in a quasi homothetic translog utility framework for canada the four composites mentioned are formed by aggregating more basic assets such as checkable deposits at banks checkable deposits at trust companies etc traditionally the simple sum aggregation has been used in this context the authors investigate both this alternative and divisia aggregation of the assets they find a low degree of substitution among the services of monetary assets and provide some evidence favoring divisia aggregation over simple sum aggregation copyright 1986 by ohio state university press

nonparametric tests of utility maximization and weak separability for consumption leisure and money some of the most fundamental assumptions of economics are utility maximization and weak separability of the arguments in the represen tative consumer s utility function this paper contains results from nonparametric tests of these assumptions about consumer behavior the authors find that quarterly per capita data on consumption goods le isure and monetary assets are consistent with utility maximization further consumption goods and leisure meet necessary and sufficient conditions for weak separability additionally one grouping of relat ively liquid monetary assets meets the necessary conditions for weak separability they also test and find no evidence of homothetic prefe rences copyright 1987 by mit press

human capital entrepreneurship and farm household earnings abstract the allocation of resources between agriculture and non agriculture is a central decision of the farm household in this paper we formulate a profit maximization model in which human capital enhances efficiency through both within sector effects and across sector allocation of quasi fixed inputs the model is estimated using chinese household data that contain detailed information on production activities we find that schooling and experience improve the sectoral uses of household supplied inputs accounting for 27 of their total contribution to earnings the evidence suggests that conventional estimates of human capital returns obtained within sectors would undervalue the role of human capital in development

the translog utility function and the demand for money in the united states in recent years considerable effort has been directed towards establishing the nature of the relationship between money and nearmonies but with mixed success the approaches vary from multi interest rate single equation studies to the careful simultaneous equations studies summarized and amended by feige and pearce 1977 and extended recently by donovan 1978 offenbacher 1979 and barnett 1980 the empirical results also vary with numerous studies favoring only one interest rate see the surveys in fisher 1978 1983 some claiming that a variety of entities are close substitutes for money e g chetty 1969 and others showing that weak substitution or even complementarity may be the result of the measurement of elasticities of substitution between money and a number of other assets e g feige and pearce 1977 offenbacher 1979 and barnett 1980 the debate seems to have overshadowed a second and equally intriguing issue which centers on the establishment of an acceptable definition of money the basic idea of this study is to take an approach that takes account of the different degrees of moneyness possessed by the various monetary assets this paper produces quantitative estimates of the degree of substitutability of other monetary assets for money in the context of a flexible functional form model with a

education and allocative efficiency household income growth during rural reforms in china this paper studies the contribution of schooling to rural income in china during factor market liberalization between 1986 and 1995 the relaxation of controls permitted farm households to reallocate productive inputs from agriculture to nonagricultural activities it is hypothesized that education facilitates this adjustment panel data from sichuan province suggest that schooling enhanced the ability of farmers to devote labor and capital to nonfarm production given the evidence that less than optimum levels of these inputs were allocated to nonagricultural uses during the transition the expansion of nonfarm activities contributed significantly to household income growth

environmental food taxes and inequalities simulation of a meat tax in sweden abstract this paper investigates the distributional effect of an environmental tax on meat in sweden if such a tax was to be introduced welfare effects are measured as compensation variation cv for multiple price changes where hicksian cross price elasticities household expenditures and price changes are included in the calculations results show that taxes on meat are almost neutral over households when expenditures on meat are used as welfare indicators and regressive if income is used this can be explained by the households similar shares of total expenditures on meat the households with the smallest income levels need to be compensated with 904 sek per person and year equivalent to euro 86 6 per year in the year 2009 exchange rate to feel that utility is not lowered if taxes on meat are introduced and the households with the highest income levels need to be compensated with 1141 sek euro 109 3 per person and year for the year 2009 these compensations correspond to 0 74 and 0 78 of total expenditures for the low and high income group respectively when instead comparing the compensation with income levels the effects correspond to 0 99 for the households with the smallest income levels and to 0 51 for the households with the largest income

community pressure and clean technology in the informal sector an econometric analysis of the adoption of propane by traditional mexican brickmakers abstract in many developing countries the informal sector comprised of low technology unlicensed micro enterprises is a major source of pollution environmental management in this sector is exceptionally challenging though clean technologies offer a means of mitigating the problem to our knowledge there has been no rigorous empirical research on why informal or even small scale firms do and do not adopt them as a first step toward filling this gap this paper presents the results of an econometric analysis of the diffusion of propane among informal traditional brickmakers in cd juarez mexico a leading source of air pollution owing to their reliance on cheap highly polluting fuels such as used tires and scrap wood the two key policy implications of our analysis are that 1 it is possible to successfully promote the adoption of a clean technology by intensely competitive informal firms even when the new technology significantly raises variable costs and 2 community pressure applied by competing firms and private sector local organizations can generate incentives for adoption

can targeted food taxes and subsidies improve the diet distributional effects among income groups this paper analyses distributional effects of revenue neutral tax reforms aimed at improving dietary quality and encouraging healthier grain consumption using data on household grain purchases we analyse both the impact on dietary quality and the tax incidence among income groups of vat reforms and excise duty reforms the vat reforms include subsidies of healthy products products labelled with the swedish national food administration s healthy symbol funded by increased vat on less healthy products the excise duty reforms contain a subsidy of fibre content funded by excise duties on either added sugar or saturated fat our results suggest that the vat reforms have a similar impact on dietary quality across all income groups with increases in fibre intake but also unwanted increases in the intake of nutrients frequently overconsumed fat salt and sugar the impact on dietary quality of the vat reforms is therefore difficult to evaluate with the exception of the lowest income group the excise duty reforms seem to have a positive health effect across all other income groups with increases in the intake of fibre and reductions in the intake of saturated fat sugar and added sugar for the lowest income group we find the highest increase in the intake of fibre but generally an increase in the intake of the other nutrients too the excise duty reforms also result in a more energy dense grain diet with increases in the intake of calories for all income groups both the vat reforms and the excise duty reforms appear to be progressive the lowest income group pays less food taxes and generally faces a lower overall post reform price level the income group that increases its tax payments most is the one with the highest income this is also the income group that faces the largest increase in the overall post reform price level

the composition and construction of monetary aggregates an economic monetary aggregate is composed from a set of monetary goods that are at least weakly separable from other goods in the optimizing agent s utility function we construct such an aggregate using a divisia index number we demonstrate that through the middle of the 1980s forecasts of the inflation rate based on our economic monetary aggregate are superior to forecasts based on the simple sum monetary aggregates m1 or m2

modeling multiple adoption decisions in a joint framework a multinomial probit mnp model is applied to the modeling of adoption decisions by farmers facing multiple technologies which can be adopted in various combinations this model allows for full investigation of the interactions between decisions to adopt or not adopt several technologies estimation is carried out in a bayesian framework employing gibbs sampling to circumvent past difficulties encountered in maximum likelihood estimation of the mnp model the model is estimated for a sample of u s apple growers with four possible sustainable production technology bundles the results show that adoption decisions are most significantly influenced by off farm labor supply

what s so spatial about diversification in nigeria summary many households in developing countries allocate their productive assets among various income generating activities in order to develop a portfolio of income from occupations with different degrees of risk expected returns and seasonal and liquidity constraints the push and pull factors influencing diversification decisions of households are widely discussed in the literature however no study to date has taken into account spatial interdependence of household decisions in spite of various channels of neighborhood effects such as information flow learning from others social networks and agglomeration economies this paper fills in the gap by incorporating spatial dependence in the choice model of diversification using a spatial auto regressive probit model and an advanced bayesian strategy to its estimation empirical analysis is run taking advantage of the nigerian general household survey panel 2010 11 providing gis coordinates for the surveyed households the results imply endogeneity of the neighbors decisions to allocate their productive assets among various occupations and signal the importance of social learning and agglomeration effects favoring the spillover of diversification activities through neighbors networks and local markets the households decisions respond to local environment factors such as weather shocks or infrastructural constraints as shown by the regional differences taking into account spatial interdependence is particularly important in the event of a wide divide of the data available into different zones as for example in case of the nigerian northern region where the states are larger