explaining agricultural productivity growth an international perspective this article presents multi output multi input total factor productivity tfp growth rates in agriculture for 88 countries over the 1970 2001 period estimated with both stochastic frontier analysis sfa and the more commonly employed data envelopment analysis dea we find results with sfa to be more plausible than with dea and use them to analyze trends across countries and the determinants of tfp growth in developing countries the central finding is that policy and institutional variables including public agricultural expenditure and proagricultural price policy reforms are significant correlates of tfp growth the most significant geographic correlate of tfp growth is distance to the nearest oecd country

monopoly pricing with negative network effects the case of vaccines abstract we study the market for vaccinations considering income heterogeneity on the demand side and monopoly power on the supply side a monopolist has an incentive to exploit the external effect of vaccinations and leave the poor susceptible in order to increase the willingness to pay the rich even the possibility of price discrimination does not remove this incentive we demonstrate that the weaknesses of standard policy measures are mitigated when income heterogeneity is taken into account this offers an efficiency based rationale for distribution oriented national or international public health interventions

on the aggregation problem in international comparisons of agricultural production aggregates abstract the major aim of this short paper is to provide an original systematic statement of the index number problem involved in obtaining internationally comparable agricultural production aggregates alternative output repricing and implicit exchange rates methods are expounded the standard method of comparison based on wheat relatives as used in the work of hayami and associates is critically reviewed and a case is made for the use of alternative procedures

the role of business subsidies in job creation of start ups gazelles and incumbents this study contributes to the empirical literature concerning the role of business subsidies in job creation our empirical analysis using an extensive firm level data suggests that the impact of business subsidies on employment growth differs more between high growth start ups and other firms than between start ups and incumbents on average all subsidies relate positively to the contemporary employment growth for both start ups and incumbents furthermore after subsidy reception the employment of both start ups and older incumbents receiving employment or other subsidies grows more than that of non subsidized firms however we find that business subsidies do not provide a significant additional boost to either contemporary or after subsidy growth for young high growth companies there are apparently some other factors that promote growth in young high growth firms these factors help foster strong growth in many cases with or without subsidies

pharmaceuticals and the developing world pharmaceuticals have greatly improved health in developing countries but many people in developing countries do not obtain even inexpensive pharmaceuticals and little pharmaceutical r d is oriented toward products needed by developing countries such as a malaria vaccine access to existing products could be improved by facilitating differential pricing for example by subsidizing donation programs and reforming health care delivery r d incentives could be improved if rich countries or international organization committed to purchase needed products when they are developed and make them available to the poor

monopoly pricing of an antibiotic subject to bacterial resistance we develop a dynamic bio economic model of bacterial resistance and disease transmission in which we characterize the pricing policy of a monopolist who is protected by a patent after expiration the monopolist behaves competitively in a generic industry having open access to the common pool of antibiotic efficacy and infection the monopolist manages endogenously the levels of antibiotic efficacy as well as the infected population which represent quality and market size respectively and achieves at least temporarily higher such levels than a hypothetically myopic monopolist who does not take into account the dynamic externalities the pricing policy and the biological system is characterized by the turnpike property before the patent vanishes the monopolist behaves more and more myopically leading to a continuous decrease in the price of the antibiotic once the generic industry takes over a discontinuous fall in price occurs whether a prolongation of the patent is socially desirable depends on the relative levels of antibiotic efficacy and infection

ldc agriculture nonparametric malmquist productivity indexes abstract this paper examines changes in agricultural productivity in 18 developing countries over the period 1961 1985 we use the nonparametric output based malmquist index to examine whether the results from such an approach confirm results from other methods that have indicated declining agricultural productivity in less developed countries ldcs the results confirm previous findings indicating that at least half of these countries have experienced productivity declines in agriculture we also found that those countries that tax agriculture most heavily had the most negative rates of productivity change

market structure and communicable diseases communicable diseases pose a formidable challenge for public policy using numerical simulations we show under which scenarios a monopolist s price and prevalence paths converge to a non zero steady state in contrast a planner typically eradicates the disease if eradication is impossible the planner subsidizes treatments as long as the prevalence can be controlled drug resistance exacerbates the welfare difference between monopoly and first best outcomes nevertheless because the negative externalities from resistance compete with the positive externalities of treatment a mixed competition monopoly regime may perform better than competition alone this result has important implications for the design of many drug patents les maladies contagieuses posent un defi important a la politique publique a l aide de simulations numeriques on montre dans quels scenarios les prix de monopole et le sentier de prevalence tendent a engendrer un regime permanent ou la maladie ne disparait pas un planificateur typiquement elimine la maladie si l eradication est impossible le planificateur subventionne les traitements aussi longtemps que la prevalence peut etre controlee la resistance au remede agrandit l ecart de bien etre entre le cas du monopole et l optimum cependant comme les effets externes negatifs de la resistance au traitement sont en conflit avec les effets externes positifs des traitements un regime mixte concurrence monopole peut donner de meilleurs resultats que la seule concurrence ce resultat a des implications importantes pour l elaboration de nombreux brevets pharmaceutiques

the effectiveness of investment subsidies evidence from a regression discontinuity design this paper analyzes the effects of an investment subsidy program for small and medium sized enterprises in flanders from 2004 to 2009 the subsidies were awarded according to a ranking system that favored young growing and productive firms with a strong cash flow granting subsidies to the highest scoring firms until the depletion of funds the nature of this allocation system creates a sharp cutoff in granting the subsidy according to the score allowing us to estimate the causal impact of the subsidies using a regression discontinuity design we find a positive effect on firm level investment employment output and productivity for the firms that were granted the subsidy but only for the small firms however the effect is small relative to the cost of the subsidy

reforms the weather and productivity growth in china s grain sector we use disaggregate county level production data to study the effects of economic reform on china s grain production between 1980 and 1990 china s grain production area is divided into five regions based on geographic agronomic and meteorological criteria regional grain production functions are estimated and weather is explicitly modeled the institutional impact of economic reform was found to explain about 38 of the production growth from 1980 to 1985 this is lower than the estimates reported in many previous studies regional differences in efficiency gains from economic reform and in the effects of weather on grain production are found to be significant

is agricultural productivity in developing countries really shrinking new evidence using a modified nonparametric approach abstract nonparametric productivity analyses performed to date show that most developing countries are experiencing relatively rapid technical regress in agriculture we discuss the plausibility of these results and argue that they stem from the existence of biased technical change and the definition of technology used we reestimate the malmquist index for a group of developing countries using a different definition of technology and find that most developing countries in our sample are experiencing positive productivity growth with technical change being the main source of this growth

financial and legal constraints to growth does firm size matter using a unique firm level survey database covering 54 countries we investigate the effect of financial legal and corruption problems on firms growth rates whether these factors constrain growth depends on firm size it is consistently the smallest firms that are most constrained financial and institutional development weakens the constraining effects of financial legal and corruption obstacles and it is again the small firms that benefit the most there is only a weak relation between firms perception of the quality of the courts in their country and firm growth we also provide evidence that the corruption of bank officials constrains firm growth

inside the black box of outcome additionality effects of early stage government subsidies on resource accumulation and new venture performance this paper examines the outcome additionality of prestigious early stage government subsidies drawing on arguments from liabilities of newness and certification literatures we develop a mediated model that unpacks the outcome additionality of the subsidy we hypothesize that subsidized new ventures attract more human and financial capital than their non subsidized counterparts because the association with a prestigious government organization signals legitimacy of the new venture such legitimacy is crucial for attracting qualified employees and financiers the effect of the access to human and financial capital in turn has long term and substantial influence on performance whereas the effect of the subsidy itself is marginal and short lived applying a novel matching approach we compare 130 approved applicants of a prestigious government subsidy with a control group of 154 applications rejected at the very last stage thereby overcoming some of the selection and endogeneity biases associated with similar studies the hypothesized model receives strong support by the data these findings have several implications for government support of new ventures as well as scholars in the field

r d subsidies and productivity in smes this paper examines the effect of r d subsidies on labour productivity we use firm level data on finnish smes from 2000 to 2012 and apply a combined matching and difference in differences method to control for selection bias we find no significant positive effect on labour productivity over the five year period after a subsidy is granted however the results vary over time and indicate a 2 4 negative effect on smes annual productivity growth one to 2 years after the subsidy year nevertheless subsidies generate a positive employment effect and enhance firm survival additional scrutiny reveals that subsidies positively affect the human capital level of low skill firms

total factor productivity growth in agriculture a malmquist index analysis of 93 countries 1980 2000 in this paper we examine levels and trends in agricultural output and productivity in 93 developed and developing countries that account for a major portion of the world population and agricultural output we make use of data drawn from the food and agriculture organization of the united nations and our study covers the period 1980 2000 due to the non availability of reliable input price data the study uses data envelopment analysis dea to derive malmquist productivity indexes the study examines trends in agricultural productivity over the period issues of catch up and convergence or in some cases possible divergence in productivity in agriculture are examined within a global framework the paper also derives the shadow prices and value shares that are implicit in the dea based malmquist productivity indices and examines the plausibility of their levels and trends over the study period

externalities and compulsary vaccinations abstract this paper challenges the conventional wisdom that because of the free rider problem a case can be made for compulsary vaccination against infectious disease for a very general class of models requiring that all individuals be vaccinated is strictly dominated by free choice the market allocation is not optimum and in the full information optimum some individuals would be compelled to be vaccinated this allocation can be achieved by taxes and subsidies however the government can exploit the revelation properties of vaccination and achieve an even better allocation than the full information optimum

network externalities and the coase conjecture abstract this paper addresses two general questions first what is the effect of market structure on the development of a network in a dynamic model with rational expectations secondly is the intuition that network externalities are economies of scale on the demand side correct these questions are examined in a model of durable good production in the presence of network externalities two results are presented first the coase conjecture fails in its strongest sense when network benefits are increasing in the current network size secondly a committed monopolist may be socially preferable to a time consistent producer when network externalities are sufficiently large the analysis indicates an analogy between network externalities and learning by doing

dynamic epidemiology and the market for vaccinations abstract the intent of this paper is to raise the question of how and when externalities can arise in the market for vaccinations static and dynamic models of such markets are developed and compared a special case in a continuous time dynamic framework is examined and is found to be efficient i e there is no externality this is in contrast to the results from the static formulation raising doubts about the suitability of a static approach these results indicate that the question of whether there are externalities in individual immunization decisions is more involved than is generally supposed

preventives versus treatments preventives are sold ex ante before disease status is realized while treatments are sold ex post even if the mean of the ex ante distribution of consumer values is the same as that ex post the shape of the distributions may differ generating a difference between the surplus each product can extract if for example consumers differ only in ex ante disease risk then a monopolist would have more difficulty extracting surplus with a preventive than with a treatment because treatment consumers having contracted the disease no longer differ in disease risk we show that the ratio of preventive to treatment producer surplus can be arbitrarily small in particular when the distribution of consumer values has a zipf shape and the disease is rare the firm s bias toward treatments can be reversed for example if the source of private information is disease severity learned ex post the difference between the producer surplus earned from the products can result in distorted rd the deadweight loss from this distortion can be as large as the entire producer surplus difference calibrations for hiv and heart attacks based on risk factors in the u s population suggest that the distribution of disease risk is sufficiently zipf similar to generate substantial differences between producer surplus from preventives and treatments empirically we find that proxies for the zipf similarity of the disease risk distribution are associated a significantly lower likelihood of vaccine development but not drug development jel codes o31 l11 i18 d42

agricultural productivity in developing countries abstract this paper examines changes in agricultural productivity in 18 developing countries over the period 1961 1985 we use a nonparametric output based malmquist index and a parametric variable coefficients cobb douglas production function to examine whether our estimates confirm results from other studies that have indicated declining agricultural productivity in ldcs the results confirm previous findings indicating that at least half of these countries have experienced productivity declines in agriculture

an intercountry comparison of agricultural production efficiency intercountry cross section comparison of total productivity in agriculture showed that differences in production efficiency were small relative to differences in labor productivity among countries at a same stage of economic development but very large among different stages of development moreover the large differences in total productivity between the developed and the less developed countries widened further during the past two decades the results suggest a hypothesis that agriculture in the less developed countries as a whole has not yet entered the phase of modern economic growth a la kuznets