multinationals productivity advantage scale or technology this study decomposes the productivity advantage of foreign multinationals into a technology and a scale effect and analyses the causal relationship between foreign ownership and these two components this is done by analyzing the effects of an acquisition of a domestic establishment by a foreign multinational using a combined propensity score matching and difference in differences estimation the main results show that any positive impact of acquisition is predominantly due to changes in technical efficiency and not in scale and that the preacquisition productivity of the target plays a role in mediating the rate of technology transfer from the multinational jel f23 l22

measuring corporate sustainability management a data envelopment analysis approach despite the increased awareness of the conceptual and practical definition of corporate sustainability questions remain on how to measure performance the objective of this paper is to advance our understanding of the measurement of corporate sustainability management by introducing a data envelopment analysis dea technique and an empirical case of a korean electronics industry in particular we employ cross efficiency in the presence of dual role factors by reflecting some complexity of a real world case donations for tax benefits by employing the combined approach of cross efficiency and dual role factors we offer a new model to measure corporate sustainability management the new model and study findings contribute to the body of knowledge in corporate sustainability management and its performance measurement

agricultural price instability a survey of competing explanations and remedies there are two explanations for agricultural price dynamics one follows cobweb logic and models fluctuations driven by expectation errors but emphasises that these expectations create complex dynamics and possibly chaos the other stems from the rational expectations tradition of dynamics driven by real shocks the empirical evidence tends to support the latter but is not conclusive the rational expectations model generates an optimal dynamic path from which no improvement can be expected from public intervention however if we take account of all the potential market failures in agricultural markets and especially in developing countries this conclusion might require some qualifications although an appropriate policy design for stability has still to be achieved this paper surveys the positive and normative literature on agricultural prices highlighting empirical evidence and identifying remaining unresolved issues

evolution of the economics of agricultural policy agricultural economists helped develop farm programs to respond to the dire economic situation of the 1920s and 1930s some early authors appreciated that such policies created problems in markets for commodities and inputs over time our understanding of agricultural issues and policies has deepened through the application of improved models and tools of analysis to more extensive data we have developed better answers to old questions and have responded to changing policy instruments market contexts and policy concerns this article traces the evolution of our deepening economic understanding of the causes and consequences of agricultural policy

dynamic perspectives on agricultural policy issues among the innovators fred waugh was one of the most prolific he made pioneering contributions in linear programming statistics and econometrics demand analysis the welfare effects of price risk and the analysis and explanation of commodity cycles as a research leader mentor and teacher at the usda he left his mark on the work of later generations of researchers i find myself no exception as will become clear from what i have to say in this paper even though i never met him in person my work has been influenced by what he wrote and by what his students wrote and taught among the many topics that interested waugh were the dynamics of free market behavior and the implications for policy formation in this paper i consider models of markets in which the dynamics run in two directions forward from current conditions to expectations of future prices and back from price expectations to current decisions both types of linkages can be crucial in competitive models of agricultural production in which land has a prominent role as the quintessential fixed asset a central challenge of market analysis from waugh s time till now has been to infer from market observations whether markets are behav

marginal rate of transformation and rate of substitution measured by dea environmental assessment comparison among european and north american nations this study discusses the new use of dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment to measure mrt marginal rate of transformation and rs rate of substitution among production factors e g inputs desirable and undesirable outputs to measure the degree on mrt and rs this study first examines a concept of disposability from the perspective of economic strategies to combat various environmental issues the strategies are extendable to a policy change for pollution prevention the underlying concept is separated into natural and managerial disposability under managerial disposability it is possible for us to measure an occurrence of desirable congestion or eco technology innovation considering the disposability concept this study discusses how to measure the type and magnitude of mrt and rs a problem of the mrt rs measurement is that these measures usually become unstable e g very large or small in these magnitudes because dea does not assume any functional form for economic activities to overcome such a difficulty this study equips dea environmental assessment with multiplier restriction by utilizing a unique feature on a proposed data treatment the multiplier restriction in dea has been never explored in previous works on environmental assessment in an application this study finds three important economic concerns on europe and north america first western europe outperforms eastern europe and north america in their unified efficiency measures under managerial disposability this study statistically confirms a difference between western and eastern europe but not between western europe and north america this result exhibits that eastern europe is not yet well developed at the level of the other two regions second eastern europe has exhibited mrt estimates that are different from western europe and north america the nations in eastern europe have an economic potential for industrial developments because the level of their industrial pollutions is less than that of the other two regions the potential is also found in their mrt estimates finally an interesting difference can be found in the rs estimate between eastern europe and western europe from 2008 to 2012 they have statistically exhibited a difference between the two regimes but not with north america this is because most nations in both western europe and north america have already attained a high level of economic successes so that they have a limited industrial potential under current production technology and eco technology the situation of the two regions will be changed along with new technology development in contrast eastern europe is different from the other two regions in terms of attaining such a level of social sustainability because of limited capital accumulation and limited opportunity for technology innovation

assessing regional eco efficiency from the perspective of resource environmental and economic performance in china a bootstrapping approach in global data envelopment analysis abstract eco efficiency has been receiving increasing attention across the world this paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis model which combines global benchmark technology directional distance function and a bootstrapping approach to investigate the dynamic trends of regional eco efficiency in china from 2003 to 2014 moreover a developed slacks based measure is utilized to decompose the performance fluctuations into resource environmental and economic efficiency then the key factors responsible for the changes in eco efficiency are explored using the global malmquist luenberger index the empirical results demonstrate an upward trend of eco efficiency in china during the study period this trend was high in eastern and northern areas but low in northwestern areas however it should be noted that some eco efficient regions still consume much land water and energy and emit much environmental pollutants in absolute terms the whole of china performs well on the economic front while resource and environmental performances are not encouraging particularly on environmental efficiency the eastern and northern regions have experienced the greatest advances in both resource and environmental efficiency while the undeveloped areas have not shown much progress which further widens the gaps between developed areas and undeveloped areas the decomposition of productivity growth indicates that technical progress is the decisive factor in promoting china s eco efficiency while decreasing management level is the major obstacle hampering the improvement in eco efficiency

efficiency analysis for exogenously fixed inputs and outputs we evaluate by means of mathematical programming formulations the relative technical and scale efficiencies of decision making units dmus when some of the inputs or outputs are exogenously fixed and beyond the discretionary control of dmu managers this approach further develops the work on efficiency evaluation and on estimation of efficient production frontiers known as data envelopment analysis dea we also employ the model to provide efficient input and output targets for dmu managers in a way that specifically accounts for the fixed nature of some of the inputs or outputs we illustrate the approach using real data for a network of fast food restaurants

eco efficiency analysis of power plants an extension of data envelopment analysis abstract in public discussion on environmental policy the notion of eco efficiency is often used the joint production of goods and undesirable outputs such as pollutants which may not be freely disposable without costs causes difficulties to measure the overall performance of the firm because of the absence of market prices for the undesirable outputs we are not able to estimate the environmental costs some of the measurement and evaluation difficulties can be overcome by employing data envelopment analysis dea as the efficiency measurement vehicle we propose the use of two different approaches in the first approach we start by decomposing the problem into two parts 1 the problem of measuring technical efficiency as the relation of the desirable outputs to the inputs and 2 the problem of measuring so called ecological efficiency as the relation of the desirable outputs to the undesirable outputs separately those two efficiency indicators are then combined in the second approach we treat pollutants as the inputs in the sense that we wish to increase desirable outputs and decrease pollutants and inputs the approaches are applied to the problem of measuring the efficiency of 24 power plants in a european country

wheat storage and trade in an efficient global market domestic and international linkages in speculative stockholdings and trade of wheat are analyzed using a dynamic rational expectations model of the world wheat market dominated by the u s and the eu the results demonstrate the importance of endogenizing both storage and trade in studying commodity markets and suggest that past government stockholdings have not followed efficient market outcomes results indicate that elimination of the export enhancement program by the u s and of export restitution payments by the eu are unlikely to have a major impact on wheat exports from the two regions but will save millions of tax dollars in both regions

estimation of dynamic nonlinear rational expectations models of primary commodity markets with stochastic dynamic programming and disequilibrium maximum likelihood methods are combined to estimate a dynamic nonlinear rational expectations model of a market for a storable primary commodity the estimation model captures the inherently nonlinear structure of private stockholding dynamics the disequilibrium effects of government buffer stock intervention and the impact of price expectations and risk on private supply and stockholding decisions copyright 1993 by mit press

a century of research on agricultural markets this article provides a perspective on major innovations in research on agricultural markets over the past century we review research on market structure and performance vertical coordination arrangements and institutions for producer collective action contributions to empirical modeling of agricultural price determination and marketing margins are also evaluated as are innovations in research on spatial market relationships and the role of storage finally we discuss contributions to understanding market information systems and the functioning of market based mechanisms for agri

volatility in wheat spot and futures markets 1950 1993 government farm programs seasonality and causality we explore how wheat spot and futures market volatility has been impacted by government farm programs during the 1950 1993 period we find that changing volatility in both markets is highly associated with changing farm programs the mandatory allotment programs of the 1950s and early 1960s 1 3 50 4 10 64 were associated with low volatility while the voluntary programs initiated in the mid 1960s seem to have induced high volatility 4 11 64 12 22 85 both market driven loan rates and conservation reserve programs appear to have helped volatility revert to lower levels since the mid 1980s 12 23 85 12 30 93 we also examine seasonality and causality in conjunction with the farm programs we explore how wheat spot and futures price volatility has been impacted by government farm programs many studies have examined the effects of various farm policies mckinnon 1967 blakeslee 1980 miranda and helmberger

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

stoking the fires co2 emissions and economic growth abstract we examine the relationship between economic development and carbon dioxide emissions a greenhouse gas central to global warming predictions estimates derived from global panel data suggest a diminishing marginal propensity to emit mpe carbon dioxide as gdp per capita rises despite this global carbon dioxide emissions growth will continue at 1 8 percent per annum for the foreseeable future a result that is not sensitive to average output growth instead emissions growth continues because output and population will grow most rapidly in lower income nations with high mpes this latter feature emphasizes the distributional consequences of policies to reduce emissions

eco efficiency guiding micro level actions towards sustainability ten basic steps for analysis abstract this paper looks at the compatibility between technological improvements at the micro level and sustainability at the macro level the two main approaches to prevent environmental degradation are technological improvement and economic degrowth how do we establish the sustainability of technological options lca type analysis of the technology system combined with economic cost analysis offers a first integrated eco efficiency score however such a technology analysis focuses on micro level technology relations only is usually too optimistic and ignores other constraints implied in a choice fitting more comprehensive knowledge into the sustainability evaluation of options requires a unifying systematic framework which is worked out in the present paper as a ten step procedure the integrative framework for empirical analysis is ultimately a comparative static systems analysis at macro level not in a deterministic dynamic mode which is impossible but as a knowledge fed scenario analysis the analysis shows the change in society s overall eco efficiency combining total value creation with total environmental impacts possible domains of application include not only technology choices like those in eco innovation including changed consumption styles and volumes but also changes in policies regarding technologies and markets whether direct policy shifts or indirect changes through institutional adaptations ultimately such a framework also allows culturally framed questions about the type of society we would like to live in to be analysed in terms of their economic and environmental consequences

industrial eco efficiency regional disparity and spatial convergence of china s regions abstract in this study the industrial eco efficiency measures of 30 chinese provinces municipalities and autonomous regions from 2001 to 2015 were estimated based on a proposed data envelopment analysis dea model and the non convex metafrontier undesirable outputs super efficiency slacks based measure ncmeta us sbm which simultaneously incorporates non convex metafrontier technology undesirable outputs and super efficiency into slacks based measure subsequently dynamic spatial econometric models were employed to test the spatial convergence of industrial eco efficiency the empirical results show that 1 the average value of industrial eco efficiency was the highest in the eastern region 0 67 followed by the western region 0 30 and central region 0 27 indicating the existence of a significant regional disparity 2 strong evidence for global and club spatial convergence of industrial eco efficiency was found with regard to regional heterogeneity provinces in the eastern region converged faster than those in the central and western regions while the convergence speed of industrial eco efficiency increased after 2008 with respect to temporal heterogeneity 3 the ownership structure appeared to have a higher impact on industrial eco efficiency than other controls in the presence of spatial conditional convergence these findings are robust with regard to both spatial econometric model and spatial weighting matrix specifications based on the empirical analysis the following policies promote industrial eco efficiency in china have been recommended first relevant authorities must take effective measures to encourage the central western regions to adopt clean energy technologies the energy subsidy policies should strive to break through the technological lock in and turn to regional green development second full advantage of the spatial effects must be taken and technological exchanges and cooperation among neighboring areas must be strengthened to ensure that the industrial eco efficiency of the central and western regions converge with those of the eastern coastal areas policy implications of multidimensional heterogeneity and adjustment of industrial structure should be highlighted while promoting industrial eco efficiency finally it is crucial to emphasize factors such as foreign direct investment fdi ownership and industrial structures to attract fdi and optimize the current industrial structure

the effects of commodity price stabilization programs in this paper the authors analyze the effects of commodity programs in which the government attempts to support and stabilize price through open market purchases and sales specifically they as sess the effects of such programs on the u s soybean market using a rational expectations model that allows for private storage expected price responsive production and arbitrary support and release price s a salient feature of the model is that private storage and product ion behavior adjusts to changes in government policy stochastic simu lations of the market model demonstrate that price stabilization prog rams can reduce long run market price and destabilize producer revenu e copyright 1988 by american economic association

consequences of discretion in the formation of commodities policy abstract in a simple model of endogenous primary commodity price support policy i policy is affected by private inventories and ii private inventories are affected by speculative attempts to forecast policy the interaction between these two forces is rich yielding bubbles and extrinsic volatility thus helping to explain some odd episodes observed in commodity markets in addition under some conditions a government that wishes to support the price but is unable to commit to future action may be impotent and a government that does not want to support the price may be trapped into doing so by speculative activity

comparing solution methods for dynamic equilibrium economies this paper compares solution methods for dynamic equilibrium economies the authors compute and simulate the stochastic neoclassical growth model with leisure choice using undetermined coefficients in levels and in logs finite elements chebyshev polynomials second and fifth order perturbations and value function iteration for several calibrations the authors document the performance of the methods in terms of computing time implementation complexity and accuracy and they present some conclusions about their preferred approaches based on the reported evidence

a kuznets curve in environmental efficiency an application on oecd countries the role of the environment is an important issue in policy making andthe accurate assessment of the environmental conditions is vital inthis paper using nonparametric techniques an environmental efficiencyindex is developed for each of the oecd countries these indexes allowone both to do cross section comparisons on the state of each country sproduction process in its treatment of undesirable outputs and also totrace each country s modification of their production processesovertime furthermore in this study we investigate the factorsunderlying societies environmental concerns that eventually lead tochanges in the environmental efficiency the results provide furtherempirical evidence for the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis

hyperbolic efficiency and return to the dollar abstract this paper after establishing the relations between hyperbolic graph measure of technical efficiency and the radial measures of technical efficiency shows that the dual cost and revenue interpretation of the hyperbolic efficiency measure is related to georgescu roegen s notion of return to the dollar n georgescu roegen in koopmans t ed activity analysis of production and allocation wiley new york 1951 pp 98 115 once this relation is established it leads to a derivation of an allocative efficiency index which measures the price distortions using data on observed costs and revenues without requiring information on prices

ecological total factor energy efficiency of regions in china most existing energy efficiency indices are computed without taking into account undesirable outputs such as co2 and so2 emissions this paper computes the ecological total factor energy efficiency etfee of 30 regions in china for the period 2005 2009 through the slack based model sbm with undesirable outputs we calculate the etfee index by comparing the target energy input obtained from sbm with undesirable outputs to the actual energy input findings show that china s regional etfee still remains a low level of around 0 600 and regional energy efficiency is overestimated by more than 0 100 when not looking at environmental impacts china s regional energy efficiency is extremely unbalanced the east area ranks first with the highest etfee of above 0 700 the northeast and central areas follow and the west area has the lowest etfee of less than 0 500 a monotone increasing relation exists between the area s etfee and china s per capita gdp the truncated regression model shows that the ratio of r d expenditure to gdp and the degree of foreign dependence have positive impacts whereas the ratio of the secondary industry to gdp and the ratio of government subsidies for industrial pollution treatment to gdp have negative effects on the etfee

price stabilization using buffer stocks abstract the price stabilization problem is stated and solved for a nonlinear cobweb model with government stocks it is shown that if the storage capacity for the commodity is sufficiently large then there exists a simple stabilization policy called the keep supply at equilibrium kse policy such that the equilibrium price is a global attractor for the corresponding closed loop system in addition it is shown that if the government approximates the equilibrium supply with the average supply stabilization is guaranteed we refer to this policy as keep supply at average ksa

how much of commodity price behavior can a rational expectations storage model explain a rational expectations competitive storage model was applied to the u s corn market to assess the aptness of this framework in explaining monthly price behavior in an actual commodity market relative to previous models extensive realism was added to the model in terms of how production activities and storage costs are specified by modeling convenience yield backwardation in prices between crop years did not depend on the unrealistic assumption of zero ending stocks our model generated cash prices that were distributed with positive skewness and kurtosis and mean and variance that increased over the storage season comparable to the persistence and the occasional spikes observed in commodity prices futures prices were generated as conditional expectations of cash prices at contract maturity and the variances of futures prices exhibited realistic time to maturity and seasonal patterns model realizations of cash and futures prices over many years were used to demonstrate the wide variety of price behaviors that could be observed in an efficient market with a similar market structure implying that economic and policy implications drawn from short historical samples of prices could be misleading

an investment analysis for china s sustainable development based on inverse data envelopment analysis abstract in the face of environmental degradation sustainable development has become a common goal across the globe making a scientifically based investment scheme is of great significance to promote the sustainable development of china s economy however there is scarce research related to such an investment scheme of sustainable development this paper proposes a new inverse data envelopment analysis method with undesirable outputs to make several scientifically based investment schemes from different perspectives namely the natural regulation and optimal perspectives by this method decision makers can scientifically forecast the specific amount of investment based on their actual sustainable development objectives which is conducive for reducing the blindness of investment in the future in addition a new ideal perspective is defined to guide a definite direction for improving the level of sustainable development combined with the gray forecasting model gm 1 1 the methods proposed by this paper were then applied to analyze the investment problem for china s sustainable development during the 2015 2024 period the results show that the unbalanced distribution of labor investment and the excessive investment in capital and energy are serious barriers to china s sustainable development in the short term and in the long term the demand for investment in labor and capital will continue to increase along with a lower demand for energy investment and that appropriately strengthening environmental regulations will not affect the overall demand for investment meanwhile improvement directions for improving china s sustainable development are discussed and the results show that most of developing and undeveloped regions in china have great potential for improvement finally some suggestions are proposed in order to create better conditions for china s sustainable development

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

modelling market fundamentals a model of the aluminium market the standard approach to modelling primary commodity markets under rational expectations is to relate the commodity price to the production and consumption surprises i e the innovations on the equations using the world aluminium market we show how this approach can be modified so that both the price and stock can be written in terms of one or more market fundamentals which reflect the supply demand balance on the market this approach allows joint estimation of production consumption stock demand and price equations subject to cross equation restrictions it may be seen as a formalization of the approach adopted by metals industry analysts

measuring eco efficiency based on green indicators and potentials in energy saving and undesirable output abatement abstract nowadays majority of organizations are seeking to achieve sustainable development with respect to green concept one of the main criteria for assessing green performance is eco efficiency to identify all aspects of the eco efficiency inputs should be divided into energy and non energy and outputs should be divided into good and bad outputs to deal with this issue a data envelopment analysis dea model is developed to divide inputs into both energy and non energy and outputs into both desirable good and undesirable bad outputs likewise variables are separated into both discretionary and non discretionary factors accordingly a bounded adjusted measure bam based on green indicators is developed to calculate the eco efficiency of decision making units dmus besides energy saving potentials and undesirable output abatement potentials are calculated to show correlation coefficient between energy consumption and undesirable output finally proposed model is validated by assessing the eco efficiency of some selected members of organization for economic cooperation and development oecd australia finland ireland new zealand and switzerland are recognized as eco efficient countries and the rest of countries are inefficient in terms of the eco efficiency high and positive spearman correlation coefficient between energy consumption and undesirable outputs addresses that the more use of energy inputs the more undesirable outputs

using data envelopment analysis for estimating energy saving and undesirable output abatement a case study in the organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries abstract environmental protection is one of the main concerns of the international community countries show meticulous attention to environmental issues by considering eco efficiency the eco efficiency evaluation of countries is a complex and multidisciplinary topic data envelopment analysis has widely been applied to measure the eco efficiency of organization for economic co operation and development countries in previous studies energy inputs have not been contemplated the subject becomes more important when there are non discretionary factors in this paper the eco efficiency of countries in the organization for economic co operation and development is assessed given energy inputs undesirable outputs and non discretionary factors to this end slack based and range adjusted measures are extended also new environmental indices are introduced the relationship between consumption of energy inputs and production of undesirable outputs can be addressed by two new environmental indices spearman correlation test indicates a direct and positive relationship between potential of energy saving and potential of undesirable output abatement france germany luxemburg norway sweden and the united kingdom are recognized as eco efficient countries south korea and italy have the highest and lowest potential for energy saving respectively poland and iceland are countries with the highest and lowest potential for undesirable output abatement respectively it can be concluded that countries producing high undesirable outputs may not operate eco efficiently and thus have an extreme potential to save the optimum energy moreover countries consuming low energy may operate eco efficiently and have a low potential to reduce undesirable outputs

the interaction of population growth and environmental quality an important question for policy is whether holding constant per capita income and other relevant factors population pressures have a significant effect upon environmental degradation the authors examine the effect of population pressures upon deforestation in 64 developing countries in an attempt to provide relevant empirical findings data on deforestation were drawn from the food and agriculture organizations production yearbook results suggest that a relationship exists between per capita income and deforestation and that for africa rural population density shifts the relationship upward the increase in the rate of deforestation levels off as income increases the rate of growth in per capita income also has a significant negative impact upon deforestation although the magnitude of the effect is small the authors close in stressing that reducing the rate of population growth is not necessarily the best way to reduce the rate of deforestation deforestation in developing countries is really a problem of market failure since property rights are often neither defined nor enforced there is essentially no private cost of deforestation with no long term stake in the land people have no incentive to use land efficiently this situation must be addressed in conjunction with the problems of poverty and population growth

worldwide acreage and yield response to international price change and volatility a dynamic panel data analysis for wheat rice corn and soybeans this study estimates a worldwide aggregate supply response for key agricultural commodities namely wheat rice corn and soybeans by employing a newly developed multi country crop and calendar specific seasonally disaggregated model with price changes and price volatility applied accordingly the findings reveal that although higher output prices serve as incentives to improve global crop supply as expected output price volatility acts as a disincentive depending on the crop the results show that own price supply elasticities range from about 0 05 to 0 40 output price volatility however has negative correlations with crop supply implying that farmers shift land other inputs and yield improving investments to crops with less volatile prices simulating the impact of price dynamics since 2006 we find that price risk has reduced the production response of wheat in particular and to a lesser extent rice thus dampening price incentive effects the simulation analysis shows that the increase in own crop price volatility during the 2006 2010 period has dampened yield by about 1 2 for the crops considered

measuring the effects of price controls using mixed complementarity models abstract government involvement in managing domestic prices of energy and other commodities is a major issue in emerging economies we examine one aspect of the problem price controls when governments set or cap prices we show how a mixed complementarity problem mcp formulation can be used to model and assess the impacts of price controls in multi sector economic equilibrium models both the gains from deregulation and the consequences of imposing new or altering existing regulations can thus be measured we present three distinct models that capture different price control situations firms have to meet demand and receive an implicit subsidy demand rationing occurs due to an associated price control constraint and subsidies limit demand rationing we present an approach to measuring the effects on the equilibrium in the first case and the levels of disequilibrium induced by price controls in the other cases we also show how to determine the most efficient allocation program when a government engages in rationing we illustrate the cases described by these models using markets that have or had price controls

optimal food price stabilization in a small open developing country in poor countries most governments implement policies aiming to stabilize the prices of staple foods which often include storage and trade measures insulating their domestic market from the world market it is of crucial importance to understand the precise motivations and efficiency of those interventions because they can have consequences worldwide this paper addresses those issues by analyzing the case of a small open developing country confronted by shocks to both the crop yield and foreign price in this model government interventions may be justified by the lack of an insurance market for food prices considering this market imperfection the authors design optimal public interventions through trade and storage policies they show that an optimal trade policy largely consists of subsidizing imports and taxing exports which benefits consumers at the expense of producers import subsidies alleviate the non negativity of food storage in other words when stocks are exhausted subsidizing imports prevents domestic price spikes one striking result an optimal storage policy on its own is detrimental to consumers since its stabilizing benefits leak into the world market and it raises the average domestic price by contrast an optimal combination of storage and trade policies results in a powerful stabilizing effect for domestic food prices

hedging grain price risk in the sadc case studies of malawi and zambia abstract we use simulation methods to examine the results of hedging maize food security imports into malawi and zambia on the south african exchange safex results show that hedging using either futures or options can spread import costs over time thereby reducing variability and also possibly generating lower average costs these benefits are increased if hedging only takes place when local prices are at less than import parity and also if the hedge is levered however problems will remain so long as intra regional transport costs remain high

methodological comparison among radial non radial and intermediate approaches for dea environmental assessment abstract this study compares three dea approaches for environmental assessment all of which are designed to examine the level of simultaneous achievement on economic prosperity and environmental protection so measuring the degree of sustainability development dea standing for data envelopment analysis has been widely applied for performance assessment in the past five decades a new type of applications is referred to as dea environmental assessment and it measures the performance of many organizations that utilize inputs to produce not only desirable outputs e g electricity but also undesirable outputs e g co 2 in the previous studies dea based performance evaluation for environment assessment is methodologically classified into radial or non radial category recently a new intermediate approach analytically locating between the radial and non radial measures has been proposed as the third alternative a use of the intermediate approach has several unique features all of which cannot be found in the radial and non radial ones the new approach measures the degree of unified inefficiency on each production factor and determines the level of total unified inefficiency from the average of the sum of these inefficiency scores this study discusses the analytical features by comparing the intermediate approach with the radial and non radial ones the methodological comparison attempts to convey a message that dea is indeed an important methodology but not perfect rather it is an approximation approach to examine the performance of various organizations many dea applications on energy and environment often suffer from a methodological bias implying that different approaches produce different empirical results thus in guiding a large policy issue such as the global warming and climate change it is necessary for us to compare several different approaches e g models and concepts to derive a reliable empirical suggestion the importance of such a message is applicable to not only dea but also the other types of empirical research in natural and social sciences therefore this study discusses the methodological bias issue from the practicality of the three dea approaches in assessing various concerns on energy and environment

dynamic environmental performance analysis a malmquist index approach abstract this article presents a general framework for dynamic environmental performance analysis by generalizing the approach proposed by kuosmanen and kortelainen kuosmanen t kortelainen m 2005 measuring eco efficiency of production with data envelopment analysis journal of industrial ecology 9 4 59 72 from a static to a dynamic setting for this purpose we construct an environmental performance index epi by applying frontier efficiency techniques and a malmquist index approach compared to other dynamic environmental productivity and efficiency analysis approaches based on these methods our approach builds on the standard definition of eco efficiency as it is presented in the ecological economics literature recognizing the importance to analyze the sources of environmental performance changes we show how changes in overall environmental performance can be decomposed into changes in relative eco efficiency and shifts in environmental technology respectively we apply the presented technique at the macro level to dynamic environmental performance analysis of 20 member states of the european union in 1990 2003 according to the results environmental technical change mostly explains the improvement in overall environmental performance while relative eco efficiency change has been minor for most countries during the sample period

verifying the relation between labor productivity and productive efficiency by means of the properties of the input output matrices the european case abstract this article discusses the relationship between labor productivity and the degree of production efficiency for 24 countries inside the european union eu over a period of 17 years a panel data econometric model is used to estimate it to this end an indicator of productive efficiency has been applied it is based on the dominant eigenvalue of the matrix of technical coefficients of the input output model this indicator allows the relationship between the economic sectors of each country and its productive technologies to be taken into account the results reveal a significant relationship between the proposed productive efficiency indicator and labor productivity finally several implications from a policy perspective are suggested as concluding remarks

labour productivity change drivers business impact and macroeconomic moderators abstract this paper focuses on the operational drivers of labour productivity changes we consider two sets of drivers a current working practices and b changes in working practices through management programs the relationship between these two sets of drivers and productivity changes are analysed we also investigate the importance of productivity growth by looking at the impact of labour productivity changes on business performance changes finally the moderating effects of industry and country on the use of drivers of productivity changes are examined data from an international survey imss iv are used for the analysis

pricing and storage of field crops a quarterly model applied to soybeans this paper considers the role of competitive storage in markets for annually harvested field crops a quarterly model is presented that considers the allocative role of storage both within and between crop years rational price expectations are endogenous variables calculated by a recursive method forward stochastic simulations using the model generate data that can be used to characterize the distributions of the variables in the base case the model is assigned parameter values from a quarterly econometric model of the u s soybean market the results shed light on the distributions of the quarterly variables including the rational price expectations and show how these distributions are affected by changes in the carrying charge

a dynamic multi stage data envelopment analysis model with application to energy consumption in the cotton industry abstract data envelopment analysis dea is a non parametric method for evaluating the relative efficiency of homogenous decision making units dmus with multiple inputs and outputs in this paper we present a dynamic multi stage dea dms dea approach to evaluate the efficiency of cotton production energy consumption in the proposed model the farms which consume resources i e fertilizers seeds and pesticides to produce cotton are assumed to be the dmus inputs not consumed during a planning period are carried over to the next period in the planning horizon initially a dms dea model is used to determine the overall efficiency of the dmus with dynamic inputs next the efficiency score of each dmu is calculated for each time period in the planning horizon we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method and exhibit the efficacy of the procedures and algorithms with a real life case study of energy consumption in the cotton industry

international commodity agreements an obituary notice abstract it is widely believed that international commodity agreements have lapsed because they have failed the reality is more complex the tin agreement did collapse but for sugar and cocoa adverse market conditions and lack of general support made stabilization impractical control of the coffee market ceased largely because of disagreements both between and within the producing countries on the division of the benefits resulting from higher prices overall commodity control fits uneasily in an increasingly globalized and competitive world and this perception has resulted in a diminished willingness to resolve the practical difficulties of price stabilization

four approaches to commodity market stabilization a comparative analysis the effects of four alternative price stabilization programs for soybeans are compared using a rational expectations model and simulation for a given government expenditure subsidized private storage is the most efficient way to stabilize market price for a given deadweight loss a program of direct payments is the most efficient stabilizer of the effective farm price this program does not stabilize market price all four programs including a buffer stock program and one involving both direct payments and buffer stocks tend to destabilize quasi rent programs that involve an initial build up of stocks increase producer benefits and hurt consumers

the working curve and commodity storage under backwardation there remains controversy over whether the empirical curve relating intertemporal commodity price spreads and stocks originally drawn by holbrook working in 1933 i e the working curve is a valid stylized fact in commodity markets the core of the controversy is the portion of the curve representing commodity stocks under backwardation in this article we analyze the original data used by working plus more disaggregated numbers we find that the working curve is indeed valid the diversity of stockholders and different stockholding motives most likely explain the empirical working curve relationship

the economic role of commodity storage one of the earliest and most successful exainples of economic policy is the oftquoted biblical account of joseph s interpretation of the pharoah s dream joseph foretold that seven years of abundant harvests would precede seven years of drought and recommended that the pharoah accumulate grain during the good years since that time the central role of storage in stabilising the economy in the face of exogenous disturbances has been obvious but our understanding of the nature of that role has not greatly advanced without divine assistance in forecasting stochastic production the storage decision is considerably more complex than the one joseph faced and the role of storage quite different in fact several commonly held impressions about the role of storage of commodities such as grains are incorrect rather than stabilising production storage actually accentuates its variability rather than causing a mean price preserving decrease or a mean output preserving decrease in the dispersion of price storage generally causes a more complex modification of the distribution of price rather than being most effective at eliminating short falls in consumption storage actually is more effective at eliminating the incidence of exceedingly high consumption in this paper we explore the role of storage in a model where production is stochastic and both production and storage are performed by competitive profitmaximisers who form rational expectations about the returns to their activities we derive the subtle but very important interactions among production price expectations and storage which simpler models cannot capture finally we make a comparative statics assessment of the distributional implications of storage these results while confirming the importance of the specification of the demand function and the supply elasticity identified in recent analytical studies e g wright i979 and newbery and stiglitz i979 are surprisingly favourable to consumers considering the asymmetric nature of the effects of storage on consumption and price storage is simply a productive activity one that transfers a commodity from one period to the next like other forms of production it is costly the total cost of storing an amount st from period t to period t i is as of period t i

the vulnerability of price stabilization schemes to speculative attack this paper examines the effects of government attempts to stabilize the prices of commodities by use of buffer stocks agricultural goods subject to supply uncertainty as well as depletable resources are considered in each case it is shown that the resulting rational expectations competitive equilibrium contains a speculative attack a situation where the entire government stock is suddenly purchased by previously inactive speculators the analysis is applied to the historical attempt to peg the gold price which caused the attack of 1968 the insights gained and the methodology developed also apply to the various international agreements to impose bans on commodity prices which have been proposed by the united nations conference on trade and development

government target price intervention in economies with incomplete markets the target price deficiency payment program is among economists favorite examples of costly government intervention in competitive markets dubbed the brannan plan after president truman s secretary of agriculture this program pays producers any positive difference between a given target price and the prevailing market price for their output in a world of certainty and perfect competition such an intervention benefits producers hurts consumers as taxpayers and causes a net harberger triangle welfare loss these implications are not only standard fare in economics lecture halls they have become conventional wisdom in contemporary policy discussions for example the 1986 economic report of the president states income support programs by inhibiting the efficient operation of agricultural markets can impose extra costs on consumers and taxpayers that exceed the amount of income transferred to farmers when such losses occur the programs are doing more than redistributing income they are wasting valuable economic resources that could be used to make everyone better off the object of this paper is to show that these conclusions do not extend to a stochastic production economy with incomplete contingent claim markets in the latter setting the distributional and welfare implications of a brannan plan can be reversed producers can be made worse off consumers can be made better off and with nonstochastic compensation all agents can be made better off the conditions under which these outcomes occur include producer risk aversion and low price and income elasticities of demand all well known characteristics of staple food markets in which target price programs are actually employed e g markets for wheat corn and rice like many other equilibrium analyses of resource allocation

on the behavior of commodity prices when speculative storage is bounded abstract this paper investigates the implications of bounded speculative storage storage bounded from below at zero and above at a capacity on commodity prices binding capacity mirrors the non negativity constraint on storage and leads to negative price spiking and higher volatility when the market is in deep contango i e low current prices at high stock levels with bounded storage there is no need to restrict storage to be costly to ensure a rational expectations equilibrium this allows the model to cover a wide range of storage technologies including free and productive storage we also provide an alternative expression for speculative prices that highlights the key role of the storage boundaries the competitive equilibrium price is the sum of discounted future probability weighted boundary prices the boundary prices can be viewed as dividends on commodities in storage reflecting the realization of economic profits from storage

on the choice of incentives in firms abstract simple models of individual and group incentives under uncertainty are compared and comparative performance is shown to depend upon various exogenous parameters the incentive effects of profit sharing will thus vary with organizational and other characteristics that may be difficult to observe and attempts to quantify productivity effects that neglect selection bias are likely to be misspecified significant selection effects are found in previously used firm level data and productivity effects of existing profit sharing are found to be much larger than potential effects in firms without sharing arrangements this throws doubt on policies to encourage sharing in isolation

a multimarket bounded price variation model under rational expectations corn and soybeans in the united states the bounded prices model under rational expectations is extended to a multimarket setting because the resulting rational expectations model is highly nonlinear fair and taylor s iterative procedure is employed in conjunction with the multimarket framework to obtain maximum likelihood estimates of a supply demand model for corn and soybeans the estimated model is then used to simulate the market equilibrium effects associated with removing price support and acreage set aside programs over the sample period among other things the results reveal that acreage set asides have dominated the induced supply effects of price support programs for corn

is environmental efficiency trade inducing or trade hindering abstract global efforts to identify strategies for sustainable economic growth and development underline the need for understanding important links between environmental policies and international trade in this paper by constructing an environmental efficiency index for 111 countries from 1980 to 2009 we are able to empirically test for one such link an improvement in the environmental efficiency index in terms of carbon dioxide emissions reflects a decrease in the cost of efforts to mitigate the environmental costs associated with growth countries that improve their environmental efficiency are found to experience strong international trade effects both through increased exports and increased imports while the positive link between efficiency improvements and exports is supportive of the porter hypothesis the positive link between efficiency improvements and imports is supportive of strong positive income effects on account of environmental efforts these results which are robust to alternative estimation strategies lend strong support to global efforts to improve countries environmental efficiencies

exploring the existence of kuznets curve in countries environmental efficiency using dea window analysis abstract this paper using data envelopment dea window analysis and generalized method of moments gmm estimators examines the existence of a kuznets type relationship between countries environmental efficiency and national income specifically it measures the environmental efficiency of 17 oecd countries by constructing environmental efficiency ratios for the time period 1980 2002 the analysis with the application of dynamic panel data reveals that there isn t a kuznets type relationship between environmental efficiency and income allowing for dynamic effects we find that the adjustment to the target ratio is instantaneous we also find that increased economic activity does not always ensure environmental protection and thus the path of growth is important in addition to the growth itself

processing industry capacity and the welfare effects of sugar policies normally analysis of policies affecting commodities such as sugar employs long run comparative statics under certainty and ignores processing industries like cane sugar refining under the implicit assumption that the capital is malleable in both the short and long run we present a dynamic model calibrated to world sugar and solved with numerical dynamic programming that includes the specific capital of the refining industry when compared to an otherwise identical static model the dynamic model suggests that some 20 of welfare losses may be misattributed to cane sugar producers instead of refiners in contrast the difference between certainty and uncertainty proves to be unimportant

testing rational expectations in primary commodity markets the standard method used to test the rational expectations hypothesis reh in primary commodity markets is by means of a structural approach in this paper a parsimonious vector error correction model in the price and stock equation is derived that maintains almost complete information of the underlying structural model the empirical section utilizes 1955 2000 us copper data to investigate the properties of the model extended to the macroeconomic variables the estimation results are statistically robust and are in keeping with economic theory three different results are found i price adjustments depend on the short run dynamic of the stock equation whereas the long run dynamic is statistically rejected ii the over identification restrictions including the test for the reh are not rejected iii the forecast simulations on price are well performed

rules versus discretion in food storage policies this article compares various policies in a rational expectations food storage model with risk averse consumers and missing insurance markets calibrated to represent a developing country i consider an optimal storage policy under discretion and two optimal simple rules a constant private storage subsidy and a price band the storage subsidy achieves welfare gains similar to the discretionary policy the price band maximizing social welfare is a price peg scheme the floor and ceiling prices are the same and the capacity constraint represents 11 of the steady state production level this price band achieves three quarters of the gains from the optimal policy under discretion

risk and household grain management in developing countries a dynamic model is presented of a household s joint production storage and trade decisions when facing transaction costs and risk in prices and yields grain management decisions balance the goals of maximising profits and reducing consumption price risk model solutions calibrated to chinese data show that grain s consumption role makes it an attractive form of precautionary saving even when households have access to credit the joint nature of production and savings decisions limits the income loss associated with risk coping and the desire to store grain can explain why subsistence households are frequently net purchasers but rarely net sellers of grain

alternative approaches to cost containment in a cap and trade system we compare several emissions reduction instruments including quantity policies with banking and borrowing price policies and hybrid policies safety valve and price collar using a dynamic model with stochastic baseline emissions the instruments are compared under the design goal of obtaining the same expected cumulative emissions across all options based on simulation analysis with the model parameterized to values relevant to proposed us climate mitigation policies we find that restrictions on banking and borrowing including the provision of interest rates on the borrowings can severely limit the value of the policy depending on the regulator chosen allowance issuance path although emissions taxes generally provide the lowest expected abatement costs a cap and trade system combined with either a safety valve or a price collar can be designed to provide expected abatement costs near those of a tax but with lower emissions variance than a tax consistently a price collar is more cost effective than a safety valve for a given expected cumulative emissions outcome because it encourages inexpensive abatement when abatement costs decline

optimal food price stabilisation policy this paper proposes a framework for designing optimal food price stabilisation policies in a self sufficient developing country it uses a rational expectations storage model with risk averse consumers and incomplete markets government stabilises food prices by carrying public stock and by applying a state contingent subsidy tax to production the policy rules are designed to maximise intertemporal welfare the optimal policy under commitment crowds out all private stockholding activity by removing the profit opportunity from speculation the countercyclical subsidy tax to production helps price stabilisation by subsidising production in periods of scarcity and by taxing it in periods of glut it contributes little to welfare gains most of which come from stabilisation achieved through public storage

slacks based efficiency measures for modeling environmental performance we develop two slacks based efficiency measures for modeling environmental performance on the basis of environmental dea technology of the two measures one is a composite index with a higher discriminating power for modeling economic environmental performance and the other can be used to estimate the impacts of environmental regulations we apply the proposed measures to model the co2 emissions of 30 oecd countries from 1998 to 2002 and present the results obtained

computing productivity firm level evidence we explore the effect of computerization on productivity and output growth using data from 527 large us firms over 1987 1994 we find that computerization makes a contribution to measured productivity and output growth in the short term using one year differences that is consistent with normal returns to computer investments however the productivity and output contributions associated with computerization are up to five times greater over long periods using five to seven year differences the results suggest that the observed contribution of computerization is accompanied by relatively large and time consuming investments in complementary inputs such as organizational capital that may be omitted in conventional calculations of productivity the large long run contribution of computers and their associated complements that we uncover may partially explain the subsequent investment surge in computers in the late 1990s

environmental regulations environmental governance efficiency and the green transformation of china s iron and steel enterprises abstract based on micro level enterprise panel data from 2005 to 2014 a slack based global data envelopment analysis dea model and a global malmquist luenberger index model are used to calculate the environmental governance efficiency ege of china s iron and steel enterprises ises then the different effects of two types of environmental regulation on ege of china s ises are analysed the results show that the overall level of ege for china s ises has remained low over the past 10 years the total factor environmental governance efficiency tfege presents a decreasing trend from 2005 to 2014 and the decline in tfege is mainly attributed to the technical progress change index gtpch moreover the bootstrap dea method is used for bias correction and the correction efficiency values are all within the confidence interval improving the accuracy of ege evaluation the regression analysis results show that different types of environmental regulations exert heterogeneous effects on tfege the relationship between market incentive environmental regulation and tfege has an inverted u shaped implying that although market incentive environmental regulation may improve the tfege in the short term continuously increasing this intensity would inhibit it however command control environmental regulation and tfege have a positive but not significant relationship