a generalized measure of farm specific technical efficiency single measures of farm specific technical efficiency over time are calculated for rice farms in central luzon the philippines from the residuals of a stochastic frontier production function panel data from the international rice research institute s periodic loop survey are used results show a narrow range of efficiency between 84 and 95 across the twenty two farms so that there is limited scope for increasing output by resource reallocation a comparison is made with measures of technical efficiency using traditional covariance analysis

technical change land quality and income distribution a general equilibrium analysis this paper investigates the distributional effects of technical progress in agriculture a small computable general equilibrium model is developed in which agricultural production occurs in two environments with fixed land resources of different quality the analytical structure permits not only the rate but also the factor biases of technical change to differ between environments distributional results are generated for several classes of households distinguished both by their ownership of factors and by their consumption patterns the results demonstrate that technical change produces distributional outcomes which are highly sensitive to its factor biases and to prior differences in land quality

one market one number a composite indicator assessment of eu internal market dynamics we consider the lack of consensus about an appropriate theoretical framework linking sub indicators as a defining characteristic of composite indicators this intrinsic feature implies uncertainties about the appropriate normalization and aggregation of the raw data the two are related index theory offers some valuable guidelines about their connection yet these do not fully solve the basic problem of expert disagreement we embed such residual disagreement in the aggregation method itself specifically we apply an impartial benefit of the doubt weighting procedure where weight restrictions incorporate the available information on experts opinions we apply this procedure to the dynamic performance assessment of eu internal market effects thereby highlighting its capacity to disaggregate member states observed performance shifts into changes relative to benchmarks and performance changes of the benchmarks i e catching up versus genuine progress our results indicate that the latter factor is more important in explaining the observed progress

specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

child fostering in africa when labor and schooling motives may coexist abstract the paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding purposive child fostering in africa whereby a non orphaned child is sent to live temporarily with relatives in the model adults decide whether to foster in or out a child in conjunction with other household choices e g own time allocation between market and non market activities children s amount of work and schooling by allowing for positive externalities from fostering and thus asymmetric motives for fostering in labor and out human capital the proposed framework predicts that school age children are sent to better off households and that some families may foster in and out simultaneously the model identifies the conditions under which all actors involved children included may benefit from fostering arrangements but also points to situations where fostering may become an opportunity to marginalize a subset of children the paper aims to provide a sound theoretical foundation that sheds light on why there exists mixed empirical evidence on the effects of fostering on children s well being and cautions against demonizing non parent residence as unequivocally detrimental to children

estimation of a u s dairy sector model by maximum simulated likelihood this paper estimates a multivariate tobit system of monthly wholesale dairy prices where four prices are lower censored by the dairy price support programme using maximum simulated likelihood msl the effects of simulation noise are tested corrected for and the relevance of estimating multivariate versus the single tobit equations discussed

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

intergenerational transfers in philippine rice villages gender differences in traditional inheritance customs abstract this paper examines education land and nonland asset transfers from parents to children in five rice villages in the philippines a model with family fixed effects explains transfers better than either individual heterogeneity or observed parent and child characteristics without family fixed effects families facing different land constraints exhibit significantly different patterns of educational investment in children in a subsample with completed inheritance daughters receive less education land and total inheritance but are compensated with nonland assets parents also exhibit preferential behavior towards children of the same gender daughters of better educated mothers receive more land nonland assets and total inheritance better educated fathers give land preferentially to sons but favor daughters in education

profit efficiency among basmati rice producers in pakistan punjab farm specific profit inefficiency among basmati rice producers was estimated from a variable coefficient profit frontier the mean level of inefficiency at farm resources and price levels was 28 with a wide range 5 87 average loss of profit was rs 1 222 per hectare socioeconomic factors related to profit loss were the farm household s education nonagricultural employment and a credit constraint institutional determinants of profit loss were a water constraint and the late application of fertilizer punjab wide benefits of increasing farmer s profit efficiency are large a 25 reduction in profit loss among basmati rice producers may generate over rs 240 million in extra profits each rice season rice is a major export commodity for pakistan generating about 2 5 billion pakistan rupees rs annually or 20 of foreign exchange earnings from commodity trade in the early 1980s two varieties dominate in pakistan s international trade in rice basmati 370 a high quality long grained aromatic variety and the medium long grained irri 6 distinct export markets exist for these rices over 90 of the basmati is exported to oil rich middle eastern nations while the mediumlong varieties are mainly marketed in southeast asia in 1983 the export price of basmati was about rs 7 900 per ton while the price of medium long grained varieties averaged rs 2 700 per ton pakistan has a comparative advantage in the international market for basmati but probably not for medium long grained rices azhar and mamhud historically pakistan had a near monopoly in international trade in basmati but now faces increased competition from thailand and the united states efferson therefore pakistan must strive to increase the efficiency of basmati production to retain its comparative advantage and competitive edge in foreign rice markets basmati 370 is a pure line selection made in

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

macroeconomic forecasting using pooled international data it has long been recognized that national economies are economically interdependent see e g burns and mitchell 1946 for evidence of comovements of business activity in several countries and zarnowitz 1985 for a summary of recent evidence recognition of such interdependence raises the question can such interdependence be exploited econometrically to produce improved forecasts of countries macroeconomic variables such as rates of growth of output and so forth this is the problem that we address in this article using annual and quarterly data for a sample of european economic community eec countries and the united states

measuring the impact of consumption linkages on the employment effects of mechanisation in philippine rice production a variant on the social accounting matrix method is used to measure consumption linkages of alternative rice production technologies the model is built for technology observed in the philippines consumption linkages are computed by incorporating consumption distribution and import substitution effects one essence of the input output framework is the recognition of multiple sub sectors for production of a single product rice simulations consider a one per cent change on consumer spending for rice met from one sub sector compared to another results indicate that the changes in employment that occur under different technological options depend importantly on the indirect effects arising from consumption linkages

a comparison of autoregressive univariate forecasting procedures for macroeconomic time series the actual performance of several automated univariate autoregressive forecasting procedures applied to 150 macroeconomic time series are compared the procedures are the random walk model as a basis for comparison long autoregressions with three alternative rules for lag length selection and a long autoregression estimated by minimizing the sum of absolute deviations the sensitivity of each procedure to preliminary transformations data periodicity forecast horizon loss function employed in parameter estimation and seasonal adjustment procedures is examined the more important conclusions are that akaike s lag length selection criterion works well in a wide variety of situations the modeling of long memory components becomes important for forecast horizons of three or more periods and linear combinations of forecasts do not improve forecast quality appreciably

empowering women inheritance rights female education and dowry payments in india this paper examines the impact of gender progressive reforms to the inheritance law in india on women s outcomes despite stipulating that daughters would have equal shares as sons in ancestral property i find that the reform failed to increase the actual likelihood of women inheriting property instead parents appear to be gifting their share of land to their sons in order to circumvent the law however parents also appear to be compensating their daughters for such disinheritance by giving them alternative transfers in the form of either higher dowries or more education following the reform

us dairy policy alternatives under bovine somatotropin a dynamic optimal control model is constructed to study us dairy policy alternatives under bovine somatotropin bst the results indicate that the adoption of bst might be slower than that indicated by the early surveys even if adoption is widespread the government can have the potentially large milk surplus problems under control with a combination of price support generic milk advertising and a cow buy out with bst adoption the government would set lower support prices and would increase assesment for milk advertising compared with the no bst case the higher adoption rates the lower the support prices and the higher the advertising assesments it is found that bst adoption is socially beneficial consumers gain at the expense of producers the government can however help produces by giving a larger policy weight to producers in setting the optimal levels of policy variables finally it is found that the current levels of generic advertising are too low and the allocation of advertising bet

human capital infrastructure and the productivity of indian rice farmers abstract along with investments in agricultural research extension and education limited investment in transportation and communication infrastructure is often identified as an important constraint on the diffusion and use of new agricultural technology yet there are few systematic studies of the relationship between agricultural infrastructure and agricultural productivity and there do not appear to be any studies which model and measure the productivity effect of infrastructure at the farm level the aim of this paper is to fill this theoretical and empirical hiatus by investigating how human capital and infrastructure constrain the choice of technology and hence productivity the effects of these capital constraints are translated into a variable coefficient production function to measure their productivity effects on indian rice farmers the findings indicate that productivity is a function of the farmer s schooling extension programs transportation and communication infrastructure irrigation availability the utilization of high yielding varieties and climatic factors these findings thus support the hypothesis that agricultural productivity is a function of transportation and communication infrastructure and suggest that infrastructure development is important to both growth and equity concerns in policy planning

migration theories and evidence an assessment abstract this paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance we also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with the harris and todaro ht model in particular the ht model is extended to examine risk averse behaviour within families where the migration of members of families serves to diversify risk the welfare implications of the individual migration decision and government intervention in the form of employment subsidies are examined recent evidence on international migration is presented it is shown that migration does not flow automatically in response to wage differentials characteristics of migrants and the process of self selection are found to be important determinants of the rate of migration

adoption of agricultural innovations in developing countries a survey this paper reviews various studies which have provided a description and possible explanation to patterns of innovation adoption in the agricultural sector the survey points out that the tendency of many studies to consider innovation adoption in dichotomous terms adoption nonadoption may not be appropriate in many cases where the actual decisions are defined over a more continuous range more attention needs to be given to the socio cultural and institutional environment in area studies so that their interrelation with economic factors affecting adoption can be inferred the presence of several interrelated innovations is another aspect that needs to be considered more carefully in future research since a number of simultaneous decisions may be involved furthermore the possibility of regular sequential patterns in adopting components of a new technological package should be specifically addressed in future studies finally the impact of differential adoption rates on land holding distribution merits attention in future research

a retrospective impact evaluation of the tamil nadu empowerment and poverty alleviation pudhu vaazhvu project abstractcommunity based livelihood interventions which focus directly on increasing income and employment have become an increasingly important component of large scale poverty reduction programmes we evaluate the impact of a participatory livelihoods intervention the tamil nadu empowerment and poverty reduction pudhu vaazhvu project pvp using propensity score matching methods the paper explores the impact of pvp on its core goals of empowering women and the rural poor improving their economic welfare and facilitating public action we find significant effects of pvp on reducing the incidence of high cost debt and diversifying livelihoods we also find evidence of women s empowerment and increased political participation

marginal values and returns to scale for nonparametric production frontiers we present a unifying linear programming approach to the calculation of various directional derivatives for a very large class of production frontiers of data envelopment analysis dea special cases of this include different marginal rates the scale elasticity and a spectrum of partial and mixed elasticity measures our development applies to any polyhedral production technology including to name a few the conventional variable and constant returns to scale dea technologies their extensions with weight restrictions technologies with weakly disposable undesirable outputs and network dea models furthermore our development provides a general method for characterization of returns to scale rts in any polyhedral technology the new approach effectively removes the need to develop bespoke models for the rts characterization and calculation of marginal rates and elasticity measures for each particular technology

efficiency of mutual funds and portfolio performance measurement a non parametric approach abstract in finance portfolio performance assessment is an important area of research the two popular indices of performance are the jensen s alpha and the sharpe index however there are a number of shortcomings of the above measures that have been highlighted in the literature we propose a new measure of performance that seeks to address the limitations of the earlier indices the new index is calculated by employing a well known method in operations research called data envelopment analysis we show the benefits of the proposed approach and assess the performance of mutual funds we compare the results with traditional indices of performance an interesting result we obtain is that the mutual funds are all approximately mean variance efficient

in the same boat but not equals the heterogeneous effects of parental income on child labour this paper examines the impact of parental income on child labour the empirical literature has found conflicting results regarding whether poverty leads parents to send their children to work mos

intra household resource allocation and familial ties abstract in this paper we investigate the link between intra household resource allocation and familial ties between household members we show that within the same geographic economic and social environments households where members have stronger familial ties nuclear family households achieve near pareto efficient allocation of productive resources and pareto efficient allocation of consumption while households with weaker familial ties extended family households do not we propose a theoretical model of the household based on the idea that altruism between household members vary with familial ties which generates predictions consistent with the observed empirical patterns

intergenerational mobility and interpersonal inequality in an african economy how much economic mobility is there across generations in a poor primarily rural economy how much do intergenerational linkages contribute to current inequality we address these questions using original survey data on senegal that include a sub household measure of consumption for cells within the household while intergenerational linkages are evident we find a relatively high degree of mobility across generations associated with the shift from farm to non farm sectors and greater economic activity of women male dominated bequests of land and housing bring little gain to consumption and play little role in explaining inequality though they have important effects on sector of activity inheritance of non land assets and the education and occupation of parents especially the mother and their choices about children s schooling are more important to adult welfare than property inheritance significant gender inequality in consumption is evident though it is almost entirely explicable in terms of factors such as education and non land inheritance there are a number of other pronounced gender differences with intergenerational linkages appearing through the mother rather than the father

uncertainty and the employment dynamics of small and large businesses we examine the impact of uncertainty on employment dynamics alternative measures of uncertainty are constructed based on the survey of professional forecasters and regression based forecasting models for gdp growth inflation sp the impact on large businesses are generally non existent or weaker our results suggest that to truly understand the effects of uncertainty on employment dynamics we need to focus on the relatively smaller and entrepreneurial businesses we discuss implications for the framing of economic policy

the hazards of piecemeal reform british civil courts and the credit market in colonial india abstract the colonial experience of developing countries provides valuable evidence regarding the impact of legal and institutional innovations on economic growth however there has been little effort by economists to study colonial policies to gain theoretical insights into the process of institutional reform this paper considers the introduction of civil courts in colonial india and its impact on agricultural credit markets in the bombay deccan drawing on historical records and a formal analysis of the credit market the paper finds that the reform led to increased competition among lenders ex ante we expect that this would have raised farmers welfare but increased competition also reduced lenders incentives to subsidize farmers investments in times of crisis leaving them more vulnerable in bad times

univariate arima forecasts of defined variables many important variables in business and economics are neither measured nor measurable but are simply defined in terms of other measured variables for instance the real interest rate is defined as the difference between the nominal interest rate and the inflation rate there are two ways to forecast a defined variable one can directly forecast the variable itself or one can derive the forecast of the defined variable indirectly from the forecasts of the constituent variables using box jenkins univariate time series analysis for four defined variables real interest rate money multiplier real gnp and money velocity the forecasting accuracy of the two methods is compared the results show that indirect forecasts tend to outperform direct methods for these defined variables

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

data envelopment analysis on a relaxed set of assumptions data envelopment analysis is a procedure for evaluation of the relative efficiency of units in a production system dea involves construction of composite units as convex combinations of other units inputs and outputs under various conditions related to returns to scale the assumption of convexity is inconsistent with increasing returns to scale and not implied by constant or non increasing returns to scale an alternative dea approach which does not invoke the assumption of a convex production possibility set is developed in this paper it is implemented in two stages stage one is concerned with the spanning of isoquants and stage two with an evaluation of the position of an observed input output combination compared to the isoquants both stages involve linear programming techniques solely

the intergenerational transmission of employers we find that about 40 of a cohort of young canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked and 6 9 have the same employer in adulthood the intergenerational transmission of employers is positively related to paternal earnings particularly at the very top of the earnings distribution and to the presence of self employment income and the number of employers with which the father has had direct contact it has an important influence on nonlinear patterns in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings

short run models and long run forecasts a note on the permanence of output fluctuations suppose that real gnp falls 1 percent lower than one would have expected from its past history how much should one change one s forecast of gnp for ten or twenty quarters ahead that is the question which has recently been addressed by campbell and mankiw 1987 and clark 1987 both of these papers estimate a parsimonious representation of the time series and then compute the implied long run response of gnp to an innovation while clark estimates that the long run impact of an innovation is less than two thirds of the initial impact campbell and mankiw present evidence that shocks persist and even grow over time the goal of this paper is to develop tests of the goodness of fit of specific time series models which are powerful against alternatives that imply different long run impulse responses with postwar quarterly data these tests favor models in which innovations are largely temporary over models in which innovations persist

farm mechanization in a semiclosed input output model the philippines employment and income distribution consequences of farm mechanization are estimated using a semiclosed input output model incorporating factor intensity consumption and import substitution effects rice production and agricultural machinery vectors from the national input output table are disaggregated into technology specific subsectors consumption is disaggregated into five household classes differing in consumption savings and imports simulations of a one percent change in consumer spending for rice met from one subsector compared to another indicate that indirect effects partially offset employment reduction from machinery and reinforce the employment increase from irrigation intensification furthermore irrigation is found to offset the inequitable effects of mechanization

output and unemployment dynamics in the united states 1950 1985 for us data over 1950 1985 the stochastic components of gnp growth and the unemployment rate appear to be stationary and there is substantial feedback between these variables the unconditional mean rate of unemployment in a joint model thus provides a natural benchmark in discussions of the business cycle a bivariate var model is used to describe output unemployment dynamics to estimate the degree of persistence of output innovations and to decompose output into trend and cycle the bivariate results are interpreted using a restricted var and it is shown that a closely related cyclical measure can be obtained directly from the okun s law equation

an analysis of production efficiency differentials in the philippines in the late seventies and early eighties policy makers in many developing encouraged extensive research to develop appropriate rice technology for unfavourable rainfed environments the question addressed in this paper is whether the farmers producing under the non irrigated rainfed environments are achieving the potential of the technology fully at the farm level the empirical analysis which concerns the farm level production behaviour of rainfed rice farmers in the philippines indicates a wide variation in production efficiencies extension advice and credit availability appear to be the two major factors influencing the gap between farmers actual and potential production levels

short and long run credit constraints in french agriculture a directional distance function framework using expenditure constrained profit functions this empirical application investigates the eventual presence of credit constraints using a panel of french farmers the credit constrained profit maximization model proposed by fare grosskopf and lee is extended in three ways first we rephrase the model in terms of directional distance functions to allow duality with the profit function second we model credit constraints in the short run and investment constraints in the long run using short and long run profit functions third we lag the expenditure constraint one year to account for the separation between planning and production we find empirical evidence of credit and investment constraints financially unconstrained farmers are larger perform better and seem to benefit from a virtuous circle where access to financial markets allows better productive choices

regulation in a dynamic market the u s dairy industry an econometric model of the u s dairy market is estimated for the period 1950 80 the economic costs of the dairy program for the period 1965 80 are calculated using ex ante ex post and long run demand and supply functions results indicate that the costs of the dairy program averaged from 430 to 590 million 1980dollars per year depending upon the choice of economic surplus measure the cost estimates depend only slightly on the year that the dairy program is assumed to have been terminated

returns to scale in different dea models abstract this paper discusses returns to scale rts in data envelopment analysis dea for each of the presently available types of models the bcc and ccr models are treated in input oriented forms while the multiplicative model is treated in output oriented form this distinction is not pertinent for the additive model which simultaneously maximizes outputs and minimizes inputs in the sense of a vector optimization quantitative estimates in the form of scale elasticities are treated in the context of multiplicative models but the bulk of the discussion is confined to qualitative characterizations such as whether rts is identified as increasing decreasing or constant this is discussed for each type of model and relations between the results for the different models are established the opening section describes and delimits approaches to be examined the concluding section outlines further opportunities for research

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 data envelopment analytic model for assessing the relative efficiency of the selling function abstract this paper presents a data envelopment analytic model for assessing the relative efficieny of sales units that simultaneously incorporates multiple sales outcomes controllable and uncontrollable resources and environmental factors the model enables comparisons among a reference set of sales units engaged in selling the same product service by deriving a single summary measure of relative sales efficiency in addition it provides insights into modifications that are necessary in order to enhance relative efficiency of an individual sales unit conditions when the sales unit has additional control over resources are explored and the effects on relative efficiency are examined an illustration of the model in the context of sales units from a sample of insurance companies demonstrates the critical features of the model

nonparametric analysis of technical and allocative efficiencies in production in this paper we extend varian s 1984 nonparametric production analysis to situations when the set of observed output input and price data is not consistent with profit maximization for at least one firm in such cases varian s results imply that no production possibility set containing all observations can rationalize the observed data we identify each firm whose performance given the prices faced by it may be found consistent with profit maximization relative to some production possibility set containing all observed output input vectors we show that the set 4 of all such firms can itself be weaklv rationalized in the sense that there exists a closed convex and monotone production possibility set that contains all the observations and relative to which the performance of all the firms in the set 8o is consistent with profit maximization given their respective prices by definition firms not included in this largest set d of efficient observations unambiguously deviate from profit maximizing behavior for any production possibility set containing all observations we follow farrell 1957 and analyze these deviations into technical and allocative efficiency measures considering as admissible all closed convex and monotone production possibility sets relative to which the performance of each firm in the set g remains consistent with profit maximization we then describe nonparametric methods for determining the tightest upper and lower bounds on the technical allocative and aggregate efficiency measures evaluated relative to all such admissible production possibility sets it is seen that the tightest upper bound on the technical efficiency measure is the same as the value computed by the nonparametric efficiency evaluation technique known as data envelopment analysis thus establishing a link between this literature in management science operations research and the nonparametric production analysis in economics

land inheritance and market transactions in uganda studies on the role of nonmarket land transactions remain limited this paper addresses two questions is land inheritance driven by underdeveloped land markets how does land inheritance influence land disposal and acquisition we use a switching regression model on household data from rural uganda we find that the initially landless or near landless households due to little or no land inheritance obtain land through land markets while those that are land rich dispose of land through land sales and bequests the results suggest that a process of land equalization is unfolding within the sample

modern technology and economic efficiency of philippine rice farmers farmer s recent study and frankel s review of griffin s book suggest that belief in a gap between actual and potential agricultural production in developing countries has regained currency in the development community timmer s concern with measuring technical efficiency and the attempts of shapiro and miiller to relate modernization and information to technical efficiency focus on differences in productivity among farmers as indicators of such a gap 2 among technologists the gap hypothesis has a number of faithful adherents including the former director of the international rice research institute irri who could not understand why the asian farmer who had adopted the new rice varieties was not doing better somehow he felt that the rice scientists who had obtained yields of 5 to 10 metric tons per hectare on the irri farm still could not explain why so many filipino farmers for example obtained on the average less than one metric ton per hectare increase in yield after shifting from the traditional to the high yielding varieties 3 in response to these persistent questions in 1974 scientists at irri began a research project to measure the yield gap and to understand the factors responsible for it the yield gap was defined by biologists as the difference under farmers conditions between the maximum yield possible

an interregional analysis of price discrimination and domestic policy reform in the u s dairy sector the u s dairy sector has experienced several reforms in both government price support and classified pricing under state and federal milk marketing orders an interregional spatial market equilibrium model of the u s dairy sector is used to provide quantitative measures of the aggregate and regional impacts of alternative domestic deregulation scenarios the model simulates the allocation of farm milk used in the production of nine dairy products in a way consistent with milk component balances for milk fat protein and carbohydrate both within and across regions results suggest current policies induce substantive aggregate and regional distortions relative to an unregulated policy

farm mechanization scale economies and polarization the japanese experience abstract whether economies of scale are the major factor underlying concentration of agricultural land in large farms has long been under debate the case study of japanese agriculture for the past three decades confirmed the tendency observed from international comparison that increasing returns in agricultural production emerge when economic development reaches a stage at which real wage rates begin to rise sharply it was found that the effect of scale economies was highly significant even though the intersectoral labor market effect was greater on land concentration the results imply that developing countries need not worry about mechanization to cause more unequal land distribution if factor markets are not unduly distorted

child farm labor the wealth paradox this article is motivated by the remarkable observation that children of land rich households are often more likely to be in work than the children of land poor households the vast majority of working children in developing economies are in agricultural work predominantly on farms operated by their families land is the most important store of wealth in agrarian societies and it is typically distributed very unequally these facts challenge the common presumption that child labor emerges from the poorest households this article suggests that this apparent paradox can be explained by failures of the markets for labor and land credit market failure will tend to weaken the force of this paradox these effects are modeled and estimates obtained using survey data from rural pakistan and ghana the main result is that the wealth paradox persists for girls in both countries whereas for boys it disappears after conditioning on other covariates

private information and altruism in bidding roscas this article studies how altruism improves allocations in a private information environment where strategic behaviour reduces economic welfare a theoretical analysis establishes that in an environment characterised by uncertainty and private information outcomes of auctions in rotating savings and credit associations roscas are more efficient when bidders preferences are altruistic rather than selfish a semi parametric structural estimation technique for rosca auctions is presented a parametric structural estimation identifies interactions between group characteristics and bidder altruism it is found that effective leadership and intra group diversity are associated with a greater extent of bidder altruism and thus more efficient intra rosca allocations

an analysis of 1980s dairy programs and some policy implications excessive government purchases of dairy surpluses during the early 1980s prompted three corrective measures the milk diversion program dairy termination program and lower support prices an eight equation econometric model of the dairy sector simulates these programs and shows them to be incomplete or impermanent in their effects however further analysis shows that a more aggressive policy of lower support prices would be effective in reducing costs to government and consumers and lowering transfers to producers

piecewise loglinear estimation of efficient production surfaces linear programming formulations for piecewise loglinear estimation of efficient production surfaces are derived from a set of basic properties postulated for the underlying production possibility sets unlike the piecewise linear model of banker charnes and cooper banker r d a charnes w w cooper 1984 models for the estimation of technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis management sci 30 september 1078 1092 this approach permits the identification of increasing marginal products and estimation of the classical s shaped production functions methods are also provided for estimating technical inefficiencies and other production characteristics such as rates of substitution and transformation marginal products returns to scale and most productive scale sizes on the basis of observed production data the results of a simulation study are reported to illustrate the usefulness of this estimation method in empirical applications when there are a priori reasons to expect increasing marginal products in some regions of the production function a modified model is provided to extend this analysis to the situation of non competing outputs addressed by the bi extremal model of banker charnes cooper and schinnar banker r d a charnes w w cooper a schinnar 1981 a bi extremal principle for frontier estimation and efficiency evaluation management sci 27 december 1370 1382

technological progress for sustaining food population balance achievement and challenges the growth in land productivity in rice cultivation has slowed down substantially since the early 1990s due to technological progress reaching its limit in the irrigated ecosystem and nonavailability of suitable technologies for the unfavorable rainfed environments this development raises concern regarding the world s ability to meet the food population balance in the coming decades rice research must deal with a number of difficult problems to meet the challenge raising the yield ceilings of the current available rice varieties protecting the past yield gains in the irrigated ecosystem and using biotechnology tools to develop high yielding varieties for the rainfed systems that are tolerant to drought submergence and problem soils the speed and extent of meeting these challenges depends on the level of resources that can be mobilized to support crop improvement research in the public sector

market analysis technical change and income distribution in semi subsistence agriculture the case of bangladesh for the first time the model developed by hayami and herdt is applied to determine gains from modern varieties of rice in bangladesh and the distribution of these gains between consumers and producers the results suggest that consumers surplus is much greater than it would have been had the high yielding crop varieties hyvs not been introduced by keeping the real price lower than it would have been otherwise the modern varieties have tended to be income equalizing for urban consumers the hayami herdt partial model even suggests that given the relatively inelastic demand for rice in bangladesh the real cash income of producers has risen slightly as a result of these new technologies in reality however the impact of these changes on incomes of farmers and the distribution of income between those involved in production is more complex it is suggested that if a less partial view is taken and if account is taken of lower cost of obtaining home consumed produce the increase in income may be greater in any event there are dangers in using such a partial model to predict the developmental consequences of technological changes affecting a staple crop and attention needs also to be given to the possibility that the supply curve may not have the simple form and pivot in the way supposed by hayami and herdt while the hayami herdt model is simple to apply it is best used as a first approximation or starting point rather than a final solution it ignores a number of criteria that could be important in assessing new agricultural technologies such as their impact on the variability of benefits to producers and consumers and their consequences for sustainability of production furthermore the hayami herdt model does not deal specifically with changes in factor shares in farm production nor does it consider the impact on income distribution of the ownership and control of critical input like irrigation and imperfection in the rural credit market it is pointed out in our paper that the adoption of hyvs has been associated with important variations in factor shares in bangladeshi rice production analysis of available farm level data indicates that the relative share of labour has fallen suggesting an uneven distribution of gains from technological changes between the owners of non labour resources and those of labour resources however the absolute share of labour has increased and it seems that rural employment has risen as result of the new technologies

credit and risk in rural developing economies abstract this paper examines the theory of credit as a means of raising the productivity and living standards of producer households who face significant uncertainty a dynamic model with uncertainty is developed in which households choose how much to invest in a yield enhancing technology how much to consume and how much to save i find that while credit has important short and medium run benefits for productivity consumption and lifetime utility these benefits are not sustained in the long run indeed under reasonable parameter settings mean consumption will fall in contrast the paper shows that risk mitigation has sustained benefits for productivity lifetime utility and equality

institutional and socioeconomic constraints on the second generation green revolution a case study of basmati rice production in pakistan s punjab these developments are setting the stage for a second generation green revolution unlike the first green revolution any new growth in agricultural productivity will be based on improving institutional and socioeconomic setups for the purpose of enhancing resource use efficiency this second generation revolution will not push modern inputs as a strategy growth in productivity will depend on the efficient use of these inputs this article investigates the constraints on the second generation green revolution by quantifying the causes of resource use inefficiency and variation in input use in agriculture a case study is presented describing socioeconomic conditions institutional setting and physical environment in two representative rice growing villages in the pakistan punjab and their role in formulating the farmers productionrelated characteristics and farm management practices in the sequence

returns to scale and most productive scale size in dea with negative data abstract non parametric evaluation of returns to scale of production units in standard dea models becomes problematic when their underlying technologies involve negative data the methodology recently offered by allahyar and rostamy malkhalifeh 2015 hence after called arm model is of some help to deal with this issue however there are two shortcomings underlying the arm model first it may not be capable of locating all the production units exhibiting constant returns to scale and second it is also not able to determine most productive scale size in order to deal with these two shortcomings the current paper contributes to the dea literature in two ways first it makes a unifying attempt to propose a general non radial dea model to determine both the most productive scale size and the returns to scale characterizations of production units in the presence of negative data second the proposed model can be adapted in a dynamic dea technology setting to determine growth efficiency and returns to growth behavior of production units facing hyper competition in a new economy

retirement saving and development traps abstract this paper establishes the existence of multiple equilibria that help explain why some countries remain poor and diverge from the economic progress experienced by rich countries endogenous growth models cannot explain the negative correlation between work lives and long run growth rates extending growth models to explain this negative correlation leads to multiple equilibria one with long work lives and low rates of growth and another with short work lives and high rates of growth

child labor and household land holding theory and empirical evidence from zimbabwe summary the relationship between rural household productive assets and child labor in developing countries is complex some empirical evidence shows that child labor tends to increase as land holding increases or there is an inverted u shaped curve relationship between the probability of putting children to work and land holding this paper shows that the relationship between use of children as laborers and land holding is nuanced child labor generally decreases as per capita land holding increases but there can be an upward bump in the relationship between child labor and landholding near the middle of the range of land per capita the bump can be explained theoretically by the relationship between the marginal productivity of a child worker on the farm and the marginal value placed on his her education at different levels of wealth this pattern is repeated in three surveys conducted in zimbabwe in 2001 2007 8 and 2010 11 from the perspective of policy making the policy maker should be alerted that the programs to promote school retention should not necessarily focus only on the poorest households in rural areas there is a high probability that middle wealth households put their children to work and this probability may change by some other factors such as gender of child and agro ecological conditions

explaining tractorization in nepal an alternative to the consequences approach abstract the debate on whether or not agricultural mechanization should be subsidized in developing countries usually focuses on the employment and yield effects of mechanization this paper takes the alternative tack that designing mechanization policy requires understanding the determinants of the mechanization choice a model of investment and factor use is developed and applied to the land preparation decision of 99 farmers in the terai region of nepal farmers ownership and use of tractors are accurately predicted by the hypothesis that farmers maximize expected accounting profits since farmers are privately efficient tractor subsidies which increase the wedge between the private and social shadow prices of mechanical power will decrease economic effiency

the cyclical component of u s economic activity quarterly data on industrial production and deflated gross national product in the united states from 1947 through 1985 are decomposed into independent nonstationary trend and stationary cycle components using kalman filtering and smoothing techniques estimates of the model parameters imply that at least half of the quarterly innovation in u s economic activity can be attributed to a stationary cyclical component that persists over periods of time as long as five years this finding is inconsistent with the hypothesis that most of the apparent variation in u s economic activity can be attributed to a nonstationary trend component

a comparative application of data envelopment analysis and translog methods an illustrative study of hospital production this paper compares inferences about hospital cost and production correspondences from two different estimation models 1 the econometric modeling of the translog cost function and 2 the application of data envelopment analysis dea while there are numerous examples of the application of each approach to empirical data this paper provides insights into the relative strengths of the estimation methods by applying both models to the same data the translog results suggest that constant reruns are operant whereas the dea results suggest that both increasing and decreasing returns to scale may be observed in different segments of the production correspondence in turn suggesting that the translog model may be averaging diametrically opposite behavior on the other hand by examining the rate of output transformation both models agree that patient days devoted to care of children are more resource intensive than those devoted to adults or to the elderly in addition we compare estimates of technical efficiencies of individual hospitals obtained from the two methods the dea estimates are found to be highly related to the capacity utilization but no such relationship was found for the translog estimates this comparative application of different estimation models to the same data to obtain inferences about the nature of underlying cost and production correspondences sheds interesting light on the strengths of each approach and suggests the need for additional research comparing estimation models using real as well as simulated data

location specificity settler type and productive efficiency a study of the mahaweli project in sri lanka increasing agricultural production and the reduction of rural inequality in income distribution are major goals of irrigated land settlement in developing countries we discuss the levels and determinants of observed differences in technical and allocative efficiency among farmers and the resulting inequality in a major irrigated land settlement scheme in sri lanka the analysis is carried out in three seperate stages first stochastic frontier production functions are estimated then farmer specific measures of efficiences are obtained on the basis of these functions finally these efficiency measures are regressed on several explanatory variables differences in human capital endowments among settler types as well as uneven distribution of water are important determinants of farmer efficiency

collective agricultural production a solution for transition economies abstract the paper examines theoretical reasons and provides examples for productivity differences between agricultural service cooperatives and collectives service cooperatives can utilize economies of scale enhance competitiveness and provide technical information advantages that often outweighed problems of free riding low investment and excessive political intervention agricultural collectives while not adding substantial advantages are in addition associated with problems of supervision and effort supply tendencies to substitute casual workers or mechanization for regular members and low investment incentives while collective forms of organization in transition economies respond to high risk and market imperfections they do so inefficiently policies that create conditions for service cooperatives to compete may lead to large productivity gains

economic efficiency and frontier techniques abstract most of the literature related to the measurement of economic efficiency has based its analysis either on parametric or on non parametric frontier methods the choice of estimation method has been an issue of debate with some researchers preferring the parametric and others the non parametric approach the aim of this paper is to provide a critical and detailed review of both core frontier methods in our opinion no approach is strictly preferable to any other moreover a careful consideration of their main advantages and disadvantages of the data set utilized and of the intrinsic characteristics of the framework under analysis will help us in the correct implementation of these techniques recent developments in frontier techniques and economic efficiency measurement such as bayesian techniques bootstrapping duality theory and the analysis of sampling asymptotic properties are also considered in this paper

on the use and misuse of profit functions for measuring the price responsiveness of peasant farmers a comment the standard profit function approach has been applied successfully in a number of ldcs to measure the price responsiveness of peasant farmers yet various problems afflict this approach including but not restricted to the existence of non competitive market structures zero valued observations exclusion of relevant variables lack of participation in output and or input markets and endogeneity of input and or output prices the impact of these problems on estimation results however can be minimised through modifications and adaptations of the standard approach better specification of the underlying technology and the use of selected functional forms

a two season agricultural household model of output and price uncertainty abstract this paper presents a two season model of a household s production consumption labor supply and storage decisions in an environment of output and price risk the analytical results in this study are markedly different from those of models prevalent in the mainstream of the agricultural household literature the empirical analysis that uses panel data from a village in india provides support for the theoretical results and underscores the seasonal dimension of the farmers choice problems the results also show that ignoring risk or risk averse preferences may introduce substantial downward bias in optimal response estimates

impact of informal institutions on the prevalence strategy and performance of family firms a meta analysis family controlled firms fcfs prevalence strategies and performance differ across countries we explain these differences through the lens of informal institutions suggesting that different countries have different levels of appreciation for family business to capture this effect we introduce the construct of family business legitimacy fbl and an associated index fbli we empirically measure fbli scores for 83 countries spanning both developed and emerging economies by combining meta analytic and archival data we show that fcfs prevail follow unique strategies and outperform non fcfs in countries with high fbli scores as a new contingency variable fbl advances the literature on the informal institutional embeddedness of organizations and family business