market access well being and nutrition evidence from ethiopia summary we use a unique data source from a rural area in northwestern ethiopia to analyze the relationship between household individual well being nutrition and market access we find that households residing in relatively more remote areas consume substantially less than households nearer to the market they are more food insecure and their school enrollment rates are lower although their diets are also less diverse we find no significant differences in mother and child anthropometric measures part of the differences in well being that we do observe can be attributed to lower household agricultural production in remote areas nonetheless agricultural production differences alone do not account for all the differences in household consumption levels for remote households an additional contributing factor is the terms of trade for remote households that negatively affect both the size of the agricultural surplus that these households market and the quantity of food items that they purchase reducing transaction costs for remote households and facilitating migration could help equalize well being among more or less favored locations

a multiobjective approach to vendor selection abstract purchases from vendors involve significant costs for many firms decisions related to these purchases include the selection of vendors and the determination of order quantities to be placed with the selected vendors such decisions are frequently multiobjective in nature that is they are evaluated by more than one criterion at least 23 criteria for various vendor selection problems have been identified in this article we present a multiobjective approach to systematically analyze the inherent tradeoffs involved in multicriteria vendor selection problems the approach is motivated by and demonstrated with an actual purchasing problem facing a division of a fortune 500 company

sales and operations planning a research synthesis abstract despite the growing body of literature on sales and operation planning s op efforts to synthesise the overall state of the art of research in this area are limited within this context this paper provides a systematic review of the literature on s op the purpose of this systematic review is twofold i to integrate the highly dispersed work on s op in order to identify and analyse s op as a business process and ii to assemble quantitative evidence of its impact on the performance of the firm a literature search framework is proposed with 271 papers reviewed and classified the framework embraces s op context information inputs and goals structure and processes outcomes and results the major expected outcome in most papers was a cross functional integration of plans although few studies report on the integration of finance plans into s op despite the existence of common process descriptors and definitions of s op there is a lack of unifying frameworks for maturity models measurement of s op and constructs related to the firm s performance the need for additional scientifically sound survey or case study research on s op is emphasised this paper contributes to a better understanding of s op s role as a determinant of firm s performance in the supply chain

a framework of economic analysis for tapered technology manufacturing alliances abstract globalization of production has altered the configuration of supply chains in many industries besides outsourcing joint ventures and strategic alliances are increasingly established to create competitive production organizations this paper addresses a case of tapered technology manufacturing alliance between a process technology firm with captive manufacturing capability and an efficient manufacturing firm in an asset heavy industry a framework of economic analysis is first developed for fusing the factors of technology licensing manufacturing efficiency risk sharing and demand uncertainty analysis methods of capacity economics are next described for participation analysis capacity allocation and contract term tradeoffs finally we demonstrate the utility of the methods by numerical examples with stylized industry data and by an analysis of alliance stability when facing potential new entrants

input subsidy programs in sub saharan africa a synthesis of recent evidence input subsidy programs have once again become a major plank of agricultural development strategies in africa ten african governments spend roughly us 1 billion annually on input subsidy programs isps amounting to 28 6 of their public expenditures on agriculture this article reviews the microlevel evidence on isps undertaken since the mid 2000s we examine the characteristics of subsidy beneficiaries crop response rates to fertilizer application and their influence on the performance of subsidy programs the impacts of subsidy programs on national fertilizer use and the development of commercial input distribution systems and finally the impact of isps on food price levels and poverty rates the weight of the evidence indicates that the costs of the programs generally outweigh their benefits findings from other developing areas with a higher proportion of crop area under irrigation and with lower fertilizer prices factors that should provide higher returns to fertilizer subsidies than in africa indicate that at least a partial reallocation of expenditures from fertilizer subsidies to r d and infrastructure would provide higher returns to agricultural growth and poverty reduction however because isps enable governments to demonstrate tangible support to constituents they are likely to remain on the african landscape for the foreseeable future hence the study identifies ways in which benefits can be enhanced through changes in implementation modalities and complementary investments within a holistic agricultural intensification strategy among the most important of these are efforts to reduce the crowding out of commercial fertilizer distribution systems and programs to improve soil fertility to enable farmers to use fertilizer more efficiently the challenges associated with achieving these gains are likely to be formidable

the inverse relationship between size of land holdings and agricultural productivity the important relationship between the size of land holdings and agricultural productivity in developing countries has been debated intensely from early soviet debates to the extensive literature generated by the release of farm management survey fms data in india the question of returns to scale and input productivities primarily for land in traditional agriculture has been confused and clouded by strong positions and ideological predilections bhagawati and chakravarty saini 1969 and bharadwaj provide extensive bibliographies on the theoretical and empirical aspects of this problem in the indian context briefly sen 1964 1966 mazumdar 1963 1965 c h h rao 1966 1970 khusro saini 1971 bhattacharya and saini more or less endorse an inverse relationship between the land size and its productivity a p rao 1963 and rudra and bandhopadhyay do not believe in the existence of an inverse relationship and argue that no systematic relationship can be established between any two variables describing land size and productivity bharadwaj and others dismiss the statistical validity of an inverse relationship but generally accept it as a stylized fact the approach used in these statistical studies is to employ aggregate average or farm level data within a village or among different villages for all crops or a few specific ones various concepts of productivity and input variables are used the actual regressions use linear or log linear functional forms using the pooled fms data for several states in south india this paper makes an attempt to reexamine in a more general way the relationship between the size of land holdings and agricultural productivity this study employs the transcendental logarithmic translog function to formalize the relation between output and an arbitrary number of inputs the translog function is not locally constrained by assumptions of homogeneity or additivity estimates of output elasticity with respect to land size for various values of cooperating inputs will indicate whether the alleged inverse relationship holds in any or all circumstances

a simulation based evaluation of the cost of cycle time reduction in agere systems wafer fabrication facility a case study abstract with the vast amount of capital invested in the semiconductor industry and the high level of competitiveness semiconductor manufacturers are continuously searching for new methods to gain more market share and increase their profits new technologies are continuously in demand and are pushing the semiconductor manufacturers to seek better market position through constant improvement in their processes and products agere systems is one of the leading companies in the microelectronics industry this paper presents a comprehensive framework for strategic capacity expansion of production equipment at agere systems wafer fabrication facility fab we integrate simulation modeling design of experiments statistical analysis and economic justification tools to aid in this highly complex decision making process we compliment the framework with a particular implementation the procedure involved studying the factors in the fab that significantly impact the cycle times of the four main technologies that are currently in process and will stay in demand for at least the next few years moreover the goal was to quantify the economic impact of reducing cycle times to accomplish the objectives of this research a valid simulation model of the production line of the fab was built the production equipment tool sets that significantly influence production cycle time were identified through factor screening experiments based on these factors several scenarios involving the acquisition of additional tools aimed at cutting down cycle times were identified and the operating characteristics curves were constructed these characteristics curves were used to relate cycle time to production volume capabilities finally an economic analysis was conducted to evaluate the return on investment in additional tools the outcome of the case study was the identification of bottleneck facilities in the fab that have a significant impact on the cycle time of the four technologies in the economic analysis the cost of adding machines to these facilities was compared with the benefits resulting from the increase in production capacities

supply chain focus dependent supplier selection problem increasing globalization diversity of the product range and increasing customer awareness are making the market s highly competitive thereby forcing different supply chains to adapt to different stimuli on a continuous basis it is also well recognized that overall supply chain focus should be given an overriding priority over the individual goals of the players if one were to improve overall supply chain surplus among all the possible order winners cost and responsiveness seem to be the most significant metrics based on which majority of the supply chains compete with each other supplier selection problem is one of the crucial problems that need to be addressed in configuring a supply chain that could have far reaching ramifications on the total supply chain costs and order winnability our model that considers inventory costs and the supply chain cycle time reduction costs would aid a supply chain manager to make informed decisions with regard to supplier selection problem at any stage dependent upon the priorities attached to supply chain costs and cycle time inventory related costs and responsiveness related costs are the two primary cost elements that are considered in this model we are also making use of a novel dimensionless quantity called the coefficient of inverse responsiveness that not only facilitates the introduction of responsiveness related costs into the model but also improves the scalability and simplifies the analysis and interpretation of the results based on the strategic model developed we offer some very interesting managerial insights with respect to the effect of cost efficient operations and or location and cost of volume related flexibility at a stage on alternate suppliers which in turn affects the overall supply chain performance

are nonconvexities important for understanding growth everyday experience and a simple logical argument show that nonconvexities are essential for understanding growth compared to previous statements of this well known argument the presentation here places more emphasis on the distinction between two of the fundamental attributes of any economic good rivalry and excludability it also emphasizes the difference between public goods and the technological advances that are fundamental to economic growth like public goods technological advances are rionrival goods hence they are inextricably linked to nonconvexities but in contrast to public goods which are nonexcludable technological advances generate benefits that are at least partially excludable hence innovations in the technology are for the most part privately provided this means that nonconvexities are relevant for goods that trade in private markets consequently an equilibrium with price taking in all markets cannot be sustained concluding remarks describe some of the recent equilibrium growth models that do not rely on price taking and highlight some of the implications of these models this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

demand modeling of stochastic product diffusion over the life cycle abstract planning during the product life cycle plc poses a number of challenges for managers due to the pace of change and uncertainties in the marketplace the ability to better understand predict and make decisions based on manifestations of demand forms a set of important operational problems that ultimately affect the profitability of enterprises this paper models the stochastic diffusion of a product in the market as a geometric brownian motion gbm process that has a time varying drift rate the model is calibrated such that model parameters are able to feature different product types and diffusion conditions imperfect information on the expected peak demand is treated as model uncertainty and a bayesian approach is employed to update knowledge on it the demand model demonstrates robust performance over a wide range of conditions despite model uncertainty it provides both qualitative and quantitative information for manufacturers and service providers to design strategies for stochastic plc conditions as well as dynamic production planning

the last mile s in modern input distribution pricing profitability and adoption increasing adoption of modern inputs remains one of the best hopes for greater agricultural production in developing countries based on unique data from northwestern ethiopia this study examines the last mile s from the input distribution center to the farmer in the chemical fertilizer and improved seed distribution system we find that increasing transaction and transportation costs over a 35 km distance along a route mainly accessible to only foot traffic lead to a 50 increase of the price of chemical fertilizer and to a 75 reduction in its use farmers who live about 10 km from the distribution center face per unit transaction and transportation costs as high as the costs needed to bring the fertilizer from the international port to the input distribution center about 1 000 km tackling the last mile s costs should thus be a priority to improve modern input adoption and use in these settings

evaluating alternative capacity strategies in semiconductor manufacturing under uncertain demand and price scenarios abstract because product demand is very volatile and machine and process technologies are advanced at a rapid pace capacity planning and investment in the semiconductor industry is a challenging task many studies have addressed mid and short term machine portfolio planning tasks of capacity planning however capacity planning should be considered in a framework of strategy planning in order to address the whole problem this paper describes a method of analysis for adapting capacity strategy to changing business environment the paper has three major parts in the first part empirical data analysis of a case study company yields predictive formulas for production and capacity costs the uncertainty of demand is also calibrated using the geometric brownian motion process in the second part experiments are designed to simulate demand and profit scenarios for comparing two capacity strategies in the third part the resultant data of simulation are analysed to gain insights to the relative performance of the two strategies in various scenarios the analysis method provides a framework for formulating capacity strategy and for integrating capacity planning with business planning

economic growth with endogenous corruption an empirical study the effect of corruption on the rate of economic growth for a panel of countries during 1984 2007 is investigated using recent improvements in dynamic panel data techniques to control for the endogeneity of corruption and investment corruption has a significant effect on the growth rate of real per capita income this effect is non linear

policies to promote cereal intensification in ethiopia the search for appropriate public and private roles over the past decade policymakers have been searching for an appropriate blend of public and private sector roles to accelerate the intensification of food staple production smallholder commercialization and sustainable market development in sub saharan africa in ethiopia steps taken to liberalize markets in the 1990s and promote fertilizer and seed packages have yet to generate payoffs in terms of higher cereal yields lower food prices or reduced dependency on food aid this raises concern about the performance of the agricultural sector specifically in terms of the systems for providing improved seed fertilizer credit and extension services this paper examines the evolving roles of the public and private sectors in intensifying cereal production in ethiopia findings suggest that while ethiopia has an admirable record of supporting agriculture its state led policies has now outlived their usefulness these findings for ethiopia offer lessons that are potentially applicable to other sub saharan african countries facing similar challenges

adoption of interrelated agricultural innovations complementarity and the impacts of risk scale and credit the paper presents a model of farm decisions which arise when a farm is faced with two interrelated innovations the innovations are distinguished by their returns to scale and may be adopted individually it is shown that under conditions of uncertainty or a binding credit constraint the intuitive concept of innovations complementarity may be misleading and a more relevant definition of complementarity is derived the latter helps to explain why policies which enhance adoption of one innovation may discourage adoption of the other even when the two innovations seem to complement each other

determining safety stock in the presence of stochastic lead time and demand we consider the problem of setting safety stock when both the demand in a period and the lead time are random variables there are two cases to consider in the first case the parameters of the demand and lead time distributions are known in the second case they are unknown and must be estimated for the case of known parameters a standard procedure is presented in the literature in this paper examples are used to show that this procedure can yield results that are far from the desired result a correct procedure is presented when the parameters are unknown it is assumed that a simple exponential smoothing model is used to generate estimates of demand in each period and that a discrete distribution of the lead time can be developed from historical data a correct procedure for setting safety stocks that is based on these two inputs is given for two popular demand models the approach is easily generalized to other models of demand safety stock calculation is simplified when certain normality assumptions are valid simulation results in the appendix indicate when these assumptions about normality are reasonable

manufacturing intelligence for semiconductor demand forecast based on technology diffusion and product life cycle abstract semiconductor industry is capital intensive in which capacity utilization significantly affect the capital effectiveness and profitability of semiconductor manufacturing companies thus demand forecasting provides critical input to support the decisions of capacity planning and the associated capital investments for capacity expansion that require long lead time however the involved uncertainty in demand and the fluctuation of semiconductor supply chains make the present problem increasingly difficult due to diversifying product lines and shortening product life cycle in the consumer electronics era semiconductor companies must forecast future demand to provide the basis for supply chain strategic decisions including new fab construction technology migration capacity transformation and expansion tool procurement and outsourcing focused on realistic needs for manufacturing intelligence this study aims to construct a multi generation diffusion model for semiconductor product demand forecast namely the smprt model incorporating seasonal factor s market growth rate m price p repeat purchases r technology substitution t in which the nonlinear least square method is employed for parameter estimation an empirical study was conducted in a leading semiconductor foundry in hsinchu science park and the results validated the practical viability of the proposed model this study concludes with discussions of the empirical findings and future research directions

saving growth and investment a macroeconomic analysis using a panel of countries this paper provides a descriptive analysis of the long and short run correlations among saving investment and growth rates for 123 countries over the period 1961 94 three results are robust across data sets and estimation methods i lagges saving rates are positively related to investment rates ii investment rates granger cause growth rates with a negative sign iii growth rates granger cause investment with a positive sign

reliability of recall in agricultural data despite the importance of agriculture to economic development and a vast accompanying literature on the subject little research has been done on the quality of the underlying data due to survey logistics agricultural data are usually collected by asking respondents to recall the details of events occurring during past agricultural seasons that took place a number of months prior to the interview this gap can lead to recall bias in reported data on agricultural activities the problem is further complicated when interviews are conducted over the course of several months thus leading to recall of variable length to test for such recall bias the length of time between harvest and interview is examined for three african countries with respect to several common agricultural input and harvest measures the analysis shows little evidence of recall bias impacting data quality there is some indication that more salient events are less subject to recall decay overall the results allay some concerns about the quality of some types of agricultural data collected through recall over lengthy periods

agricultural transformation in africa assessing the evidence in ethiopia summary despite significant efforts africa has struggled to imitate the rapid agricultural growth that took place in asia in the 1960s and 1970s as a rare but important exception ethiopia s agriculture sector recorded remarkable rapid growth during 2004 14 this paper explores this rapid change in the agriculture sector of this important country the second most populous in africa we review the evidence on agricultural growth and decompose the contributions of modern inputs to growth using an adjusted solow decomposition model we also highlight the key pathways ethiopia followed to achieve its agricultural growth we find that land and labor use expanded significantly and total factor productivity grew by about 2 3 per year over the study period moreover modern input use more than doubled explaining some of this growth the expansion in modern input use appears to have been driven by high government expenditures on the agriculture sector including agricultural extension but also by an improved road network higher rural education levels and favorable international and local price incentives

structural transformation of cereal markets in ethiopia abstractwe study cereal markets in ethiopia over the last decade a period that has been characterised by important local changes including strong economic growth urbanisation improved road and communication infrastructure and higher adoption of modern inputs in agriculture these changes are associated with better spatial price integration as well as with significant declines in real price differences between supplying and receiving markets and in cereal milling and retail margins in short important improvements have occurred in ethiopia s cereal marketing system this is especially important because dysfunctional cereal markets were previously identified as an important cause of food insecurity in the country

environmental performance corruption and economic growth global evidence using a new data set abstractthis study investigates the relationship between environmental performance corruption and economic growth using panel data of 87 countries covering the period from 2002 to 2012 the environmental performance index is used for the first time to evaluate the environmental quality on economic growth by employing both static and dynamic panel models we find that environmental performance is positively related to economic growth and is more significant in non organization for economic cooperation development oecd countries moreover when corruption is incorporated the empirical estimation results indicate that although lower corruption helps economic growth in non oecd countries the negative coefficients of the three interactive terms show that the positive effect of environment performance on economic growth will drop while greater environmental performance combined with natural resource abundance inevitably leads to inefficient bureaucracies and hence disadvantageous economic growth as

impacts of land certification on tenure security investment and land market participation evidence from ethiopia this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled impacts of land certification on tenure security investment and land market participation evidence from ethiopia conducted between 2006 and 2011 in ethiopia the study observed the impact of land registration on tenure security land related investment and rental market participation using 900 randomly selected households and 4000 plots cultivated by the households on the household and land plots level certification resulted in significant reduction of tenure insecurity and an increase in land related investment the propensity to invest in water conservation increased between 20 and 30 percent from panel estimates the increased investment appears to be sustained over the long term the propensity to rent land increases by 9 to 13 percent the titling had significant positive impacts on the rate at which female headed households rented their land funding for the study derived from the gender action plan global land tools network and norwegian environmentally and socially sustainable development essd trust fund

corruption and development a review of issues in this paper we start with a discussion of some of the different denotations of the problem of corruption we then consider the ways in which the damaging consequences of corruption operate in a developing economy while not ignoring its possible redeeming features in some cases we pursue the question of why corruption is perceptibly so different in different societies and also persistent finally we examine the feasible policy issues that arise in this context

does the quality of institutions enhance savings the case of sub saharan africa over the last three decades there has been increasing disparity in savings across regions and income groupings globally in this paper we investigate whether the quality of institutions explains

the relation between farm size and farm productivity the role of family labor supervision and credit constraints abstract the paper shows that if the performance of hired farmhands is affected by supervision from family members and if the availability of credit is dependent on the amount of land owned then a systematic positive or negative relationship between per acre yields and farm size will prevail a model with no supervision effects on labor productivity would predict that yields are unaffected by farm size the paper also investigates the relation between land utilization and owned holding size when land rental possibilities are limited results are shown to be compatible with various observed patterns in ldcs

the total cost of logistics in supplier selection under conditions of multiple sourcing multiple criteria and capacity constraint abstract little attention is given in the literature to decisions on the appropriate selection of suppliers and on assigning order quantities to these suppliers in the case of multiple sourcing with multiple criteria and with suppliers capacity constraints only a few mathematical programming models to analyse such decisions have been published to date and these have tended to consider only net price as the cost of purchasing although the costs of transportation ordering and storage may be significantly important to the decision in this paper a mixed integer non linear programming model is presented to solve the multiple sourcing problem which takes into account the total cost of logistics including net price storage transportation and ordering costs buyer limitations on budget quality service etc can also be considered in the model an algorithm is proposed to solve the model and the model is illustrated using a numerical example

toward a green revolution in africa what would it achieve and what would it require the current global food crisis has reemphasized the costliness of africa s failure to achieve food security and poverty reduction the instrument by which other more successful developing countries achieved these outcomes was a green revolution in agriculture while previous research has provided largely discursive appraisals of the viability of an african green revolution this article adopts a more rigorous methodology to address that question first an economy wide multimarket model augmented with existing poverty growth elasticities is developed to assess the likely impacts of a rapid acceleration in food production of the kind witnessed in previous green revolutions on food prices consumption and demand farmer revenue and poverty our results suggest that a rapid growth in staple production together with more integrated regional markets would reduce food prices by roughly 20 40 for consumers and 10 20 for producers among the major crops this translates into a large rise in farm revenues annual agricultural growth rates of 6 5 or higher broader income growth and food security and over 70 million africans being lifted out of poverty the article concludes by emphasizing the kinds of fundamental policy actions and resources that would be required for achieving these outcomes

how productive is infrastructure a new approach and evidence from rural india there have been competing arguments about the effect of public infrastructure on productivity level based and debate based regressions often lead to different estimates to help reconcile this difference this article applies the gmm method to first test for causality to check for length of lagged relationships and the existence of reverse causality before specifying a final model and deciding the estimation procedure this approach is illustrated using a panel data set for india the results show that infrastructure development in india is productive providing supporting evidence to reverse the trend of declining investment in rural infrastructure

the dynamics of agricultural biotechnology adoption lessons from series rbst use in wisconsin 1994 2001 this article exploits panel data from wisconsin dairy farmers to examine the dynamics of recombinant bovine somatotropin rbst adoption and to identify the characteristics that distinguish among nonadopters disadopters and early and late adopters panel methods are used to control for omitted variables and endogenous regressors that call into question coefficient estimates derived from cross section adoption models the results however confirm previous findings that larger farms with complementary feeding technologies are more likely to adopt rbst nonadopters appear quite unlikely to become adopters and rbst adoption will remain at rather moderate levels in wisconsin

a multi phase mathematical programming approach for effective supply chain design abstract a supply chain is an alliance of independent business processes such as supplier manufacturing and distribution processes that perform the critical functions in the order fulfillment process effective design and management of supply chains assists in production and delivery of a variety of products at low cost high quality and short lead times although the importance of supply chain design is emphasized in the literature few formal decision models have been proposed for this purpose this paper presents a multi phase mathematical programming approach for effective supply chain design more specifically the methodology develops and applies a combination of multi criteria efficiency models based on game theory concepts and linear and integer programming methods model application and insights are detailed through numerical illustrations

government expenditure corruption and total factor productivity abstract this paper classifies government expenditures into three types and constructs a theoretical framework to explore the influences of government expenditures and corruption on total factor productivity it then establishes a dynamic spatial autoregressive model and a panel threshold model to test the theoretical hypotheses based on provincial panel data from 2007 to 2014 the results illustrate that u shape curve relationships exist between government expenditures of administrative service investment development safeguard governance and total factor productivity and that the relationship between the government expenditure structure and total factor productivity follows an inverted u shape curve in addition the findings suggest that increased corruption levels can directly reduce regional total factor productivity and that the effects of the proportions of administrative service expenditures investment development expenditures and safeguard governance expenditures on total factor productivity have a single corruption threshold increasing the proportions of government expenditures could improve the total factor productivity up until the threshold value

do market regulations reduce investment evidence from european regions abstractdo market regulations reduce investment evidence from european regions regional studies this paper investigates the impact of market imperfections on non farm business sector investment in european regions for 1995 2007 using dynamic panel and generalized method of moments gmm methods for estimating a euler equation the results show that barriers to entrepreneurship and to trade and investment decrease the productivity of capital which has negative effects on european regions investment corruption leads to increased operational costs creates uncertainty and thereby deters investment greater labour market regulation also means higher labour costs hiring and firing regulation and employment protection and legislation indicators increase the productivity of capital which has positive effects on regional investment

the global bio economy throughout history agriculture and natural resources have been used for the production of food feed fibre fuel and environmental goods recent developments in demand both in terms of quantity and quality technology and traditional energy and chemistry markets have reinforced the demand for nonfood applications these developments in combination with increased consumer demands for various food characteristics have led to a rapidly growing and globally integrated bio economy this article introduces and summarizes the plenary papers on the opportunities and challenges for the bio economy that were presented at the 28th triennial conference of the international association of agricultural economists iaae in brazil the following aspects of the bio economy are covered finance volatility poverty conflict productivity investment resource constraints and governance

productivity technology and economic growth what is the relationship the relationship between productivity technology and economic growth has been debated extensively in the endogenous growth growth accounting new economy and policy literature this paper briefly surveys the literature on total factor productivity tfp calculations the various techniques and problems associated with it we argue that tfp is not a measure of technological change and only under ideal conditions does it measure the supernormal profits associated with technological change the critical driving force of economic growth is not the super normal profits that technological change generates but rather the continuous creation of opportunities for further technological development six illustrations of when tfp fails to correctly measure these super normal profits are provided a version carlaw and lipsey s 2003b model of endogenous general purpose technology driven growth is then utilized to make some progress toward answering prescott s 1998 call for a theory of tfp the model is used to simulate artificial data and connect theoretical assumptions of returns to scale and resource costs to the conditions under which tfp miss measures the actual growth of technological knowledge

rural wages labor supply and land reform a theoretical and empirical analysis land reform is one of the most mentioned of the theoretical policy instruments discussed in the development literature yet relatively little attention has been paid to the wage rate consequences of such a program despite the fact that perhaps more than one half of rural families in a developing country receive a substantial proportion of their income from wage earnings in agriculture one reason for this lacuna may be that the determination of wages and family labor supply in the agricultural sector of ldcs has also been somewhat neglected particularly in the context of a heterogeneous labor force 2 the subsistence or institutional wage models of w arthur lewis john fei and gustav ranis and gerald rodgers for instance offer no theory of how rural wage levels or differentials are set and thus provide little guidance on how wage rates would be affected by changes in land ownership patterns more recently pranab bardhan and t n srinivasan david newbery and clive bell and pinhas zusman who formulate general equilibrium market or bargaining models determining endogenously the rental share paid by tenant sharecroppers have assumed that agricultural wage rates are exogenous or determined only by nonagricultural factors all of these models assume that rural labor is homogeneous another reason why the potential wage impact of a land reform program may have received little attention is that models of peasant family behavior such as those of a k sen dipak mazumdar and robert mabro typically embody two restrictive assumptions which would tend to make the equalization of landholdings appear wage augmenting although this implication has never been formally derived these assumptions are that 1 agriculture is dualistic with small farm families facing lower shadow prices of labor leisure than large farm landlords because of impediments to labor mobility and 2 agricultural households are dichotomous small farmers employ family labor and maximize utility while large farms only utilize wage labor and maximize profits data from a 1970 71 allindia survey of over 5 000 households collected by the national council of applied economic research3 indicate however that almost all cultivator households large and small participate actively in the labor market as either buyers or sellers of labor services with almost 88 percent of households cultivating a gross cropped area less than 1 5 acres utilizing some hired labor seventynine percent of these small farm households associate professor yale ujniversity the research embodied in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the ford and rockefeller foundations program in support of social science and legal research on population policy and with funds from the u s agency for international development under order no aid otr 1432 helpful suggestions and comments were provided by james l mccabe mark gersovitz an anonymous referee the managing editor and members of the economic growth center yale university i am also grateful to the members of the research program in development studies princeton university for the use of their facilities research assistance was provided by james devine anne morgan and roberta robson inotable exceptions are r albert berry mark gersovitz and m a rahman all of these authors however employ geometric analyses with differing assumptions leading to wholly different predictions regarding wage effects none consider the heterogeneity of agricultural labor pay attention to questions of stability or attempt to apply their models to data 2lnformation on the differential impact of alternative agricultural policies including land reform on sex or age specific wage rates is not only important in settling income distribution and equity issues but as suggested in an article by the author and robert evenson may have significant implications for population growth and schooling as well 3for a more detailed discussion of these data see the author

why have some indian states done better than others at reducing rural poverty the unevenness of the rise in rural living standards in the various states of india since the 1950s allowed the authors to study the causes of poverty they modeled the evolution of average consumption and various poverty measures using pooled state level data for 1957 91 they found that poverty was reduced by higher agricultural yields above trend growth in nonfarm output and lower inflation rates but these factors only partly explain relative success and failure in reducing poverty initial conditions also mattered states that started the period with better infrastructure and human resources with more intense irrigation greater literacy and lower infant mortality rates had significantly greater long term rates of consumption growth and poverty reduction by and large the same variables that promoted growth in average consumption also helped reduce poverty the effects on poverty measures were partly redistributive in nature after controlling for inflation the authors found that some of the factors that helped reduce absolute poverty also improved distribution and none of the factors that reduced absolute poverty had adverse impacts on distribution in other words there was no sign of tradeoffs between growth and pro poor distribution

neighbors and extension agents in ethiopia who matters more for technology adoption improving agricultural productivity is seen as vital to economic growth in poor countries particularly in sub saharan africa where productivity growth has lagged behind that of other continents the focus has therefore been on new technologies particularly the adoption and diffusion of improved seed varieties and the increased use of fertiliser supported by investments in effective extension services it is important to understand how these new technologies spread and the effectiveness of extension services in this process

rent seeking and growth the case of growth through human capital accumulation this paper follows the work of h uzawa 1965 and r e lucas 1988 by presenting an endogenous growth model with human capital accumulation as the engine of growth agents make time allocation decisions in an economy where quantitative restrictions are employed in the trade regime agents may allocate time to obtain valuable import licences the effect of this activity on the growth rate is found to be dependent upon whether agents specialize in the rent seeking activity when agents do not specialize the rent seeking activity reduces growth by reducing the incentive to accumulate productive human capital

property rights corruption and the allocation of talent a general equilibrium approach we consider an economy where contracts are necessary to encourage investments contract enforcement requires that a fraction of the agents work in the public sector and do not accept bribes we find that 1 it may be optimal to allow some corruption and not enforce property rights fully 2 less developed economies may choose lower levels of property right enforcement and more corruption 3 there may exist a free lunch such that over a certain range it is possible simultaneously to reduce corruption increase investment and achieve a better allocation of talent bureaucratic corruption is widespread in many societies casual empiricism and case studies suggest that corruption distorts the allocation of resources and discourages investment and the creation of new firms e g mydral 1968 desoto 1989 cross country studies also find that countries with high corruption or long bureaucratic delays suffer lower growth e g mauro 1996 sartre 1997 it is therefore tempting to conclude that government policies and bureaucratic corruption are at least partly responsible for the lack of development or slow growth of many economies e g shleifer and vishny 1993 nevertheless governments and bureaucracies do not exist only to seek rents they perform a number of useful functions including provision of public goods correction of market failures and redistribution without understanding why the state exists it is difficult to assess why corruption arises what its consequences are and whether and how it should be prevented in this paper we analyse how the employees of the state bureaucrats can misuse their power to enforce property rights the protection of property rights is commonly viewed as one of the most important roles of the state by political philosophers as diverse as david hume karl marx and robert nozick while a number of social scientists including north and thomas 1973 and rosenberg and bridzell 1989 emphasise the importance of secure property rights in the development of western societies for the state to have a role in enforcing property rights some contractual problems must exist between private parties in our economy these contractual problems are between entrepreneurs in particular production requires two agents and one of the entrepreneurs needs to undertake an investment but the returns accrue to the other one this can be thought as a partnership with the first agent as an upstream supplier providing an input of variable

corruption and inefficiency theory and evidence from electric utilities we investigate the determinants of the efficiency of firms with a focus on the role of corruption we construct a simple theoretical model where corruption increases factor requirements of firms because it diverts managerial effort away from factor coordination we then exploit a unique dataset comprising firm level information on 80 electricity distribution firms from 13 latin american countries for the years 1994 to 2001 as predicted by the model we find that more corruption in the country is strongly associated with more inefficient firms in the sense that they employ more inputs to produce a given level of output the economic magnitude of the effects is large the results hold both in models with country and firm fixed effects the results survive several robustness checks including different measures of output and efficiency and instrumenting for corruption other elements associated with inefficiency are public ownership inflation and lack of law and order but corruption appears to play a separate and more robust role

on bullwhip in supply chains historical review present practice and expected future impact abstract demand amplification or bullwhip as it is now called is not a new phenomenon since evidence of its existence has been recorded at least as far back as the start of the 20th century and is well known to economists yet industry worldwide still has to cope with bullwhip measured not just in terms of the 2 1 amplification which is frequently quoted but sometimes it is as high as 20 1 from end to end in the supply chain this can be very costly in terms of capacity on costs and stock out costs on the upswing and stockholding and obsolescence costs on the downswing in this paper we have identified 10 published causes of bullwhip all of which are capable of elimination by re engineering the supply chain we offer evidence on the present health of a family of supply chains and pinpoint much good practice this is in anticipation that such excellence will become normative in the near future as the learning experience gathers momentum and provided that human factors are properly addressed

the evolving role of agriculture in poverty reduction an empirical perspective abstract the role of agriculture in development remains much debated this paper takes an empirical perspective and focuses on poverty as opposed to growth alone the contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its own growth performance its indirect impact on growth in other sectors the extent to which poor people participate in the sector and the size of the sector in the overall economy bringing together these different effects using cross country econometric evidence indicates that agriculture is significantly more effective in reducing poverty among the poorest of the poor as reflected in the 1 day squared poverty gap it is also up to 3 2 times better at reducing 1 day headcount poverty in low income and resource rich countries including those in sub saharan africa at least when societies are not fundamentally unequal however when it comes to the better off poor reflected in the 2 day measure non agriculture has the edge these results are driven by the much larger participation of poorer households in growth from agriculture and the lower poverty reducing effect of non agriculture in the presence of extractive industries

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

land pressures the evolution of farming systems and development strategies in africa a synthesis abstract evidence assembled in this special issue of food policy shows that rising rural population densities in parts of africa are profoundly affecting farming systems and the region s economies in ways that are underappreciated in current discourse on african development issues this study synthesizes how people markets and governments are responding to rising land pressures in africa drawing on key findings from the various contributions in this special issue the papers herein revisit the issue of boserupian agricultural intensification as an important response to land constraints but they also go further than boserup and her followers to explore broader responses to land constraints including non farm diversification migration and reduced fertility rates agricultural and rural development strategies in the region will need to more fully anticipate the implications of africa s rapidly changing land and demographic situation and the immense challenges that mounting land pressures pose in the context of current evidence of unsustainable agricultural intensification a rapidly rising labor force associated with the region s current demographic conditions and limited nonfarm job creation these challenges are manageable but will require explicit policy actions to address the unique development challenges in densely populated rural areas

governance and growth a simple hypothesis explaining cross country differences in productivity growth cross country evidence shows that a subset of developing countries isgrowing very rapidly taking advantage of opportunities to catch up atthe same time that other developing countries are growing slowly we arguethat this is due to differences in the quality of governance inparticular we show that productivity growth is higher in better governedcountries

the inverse relationship between productivity and farm size a test using regional data from india the farm size productivity debate for india needs little introduction it has occupied a prominent position in the agricultural economics literature since 1962 when sen observed that indian farm management data revealed an inverse relationship between farm size and yields per acre since then no fewer than twenty journal papers have appeared on this subject sen 1975 the objective of this paper is to test two hypotheses that were either not given enough attention or left unresolved in the debate the first is that the inverse relationship is valid for all of indian agriculture it is not merely a phenomenon observed in a few sample villages this means a test of the hypothesis that the small farm sector as a whole is more productive than the large farm sector in indian agriculture the second hypothesis is that the inverse relationship is true only of a traditional agriculture and that it breaks down with technical progress a methodology is developed below which uses cross sectional regional data to test the two hypotheses simultaneously on applying this methodology to indian district level data 272 districts for 1970 71 it is found that the hypothesis of the small farm sector being more productive than the large farm sector cannot be rejected at low levels of agricultural technology but can be rejected at higher levels this suggests that the inverse relationship between yields and farm size although valid for a traditional agriculture cannot be assumed to exist in an agriculture experiencing technical change

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

bureaucratic corruption and endogenous economic growth there appears to be significant diversity in the incidence of bureaucratic corruption across countries at different stages of economic development and under different political and economic regimes little theoretical or empirical analysis has been offered however on the link between corruption government and growth the paper attempts to fill the void through equilibrium models of endogenous growth balanced growth is derived as a balancing act between accumulating human capital which engenders growth and accumulating political capital which mainly assures bureaucratic power the analysis focuses on the interplay between investment in these two types of capital and its implications for long term growth under alternative political regimes some propositions are tested and confirmed empirically

corruption and investment theory and evidence from china abstract we consider a principal agent model to examine the conditions under which corruption prompts investment we also investigate three policies that can be used to combat corruption strengthening monitoring increasing compensation and enhancing accountability our theory suggests that increasing monitoring intensity mitigates corruption at the cost of reduced investment the most cost effective policy to control corruption is to enhance accountability which reduces corruption without decreasing growth enhancing investment we test our theo retical predictions using chinese infrastructure investment and corruption data the data show that infrastructure investment is negatively correlated with anti corruption effort as predicted by the theoretical model

consumption risk technology adoption and poverty traps evidence from ethiopia much has been written on the determinants of input and technology adoption in agriculture with issues such as input availability knowledge and education risk preferences profitability and credit constraints receiving much attention this paper focuses on a factor that has been less well documented the differential ability of households to take on risky production technologies for fear of the welfare consequences if shocks result in poor harvests building on an explicit model this is explored in panel data for ethiopia historical rainfall distributions are used to identify the counterfactual consumption risk controlling for unobserved household and time varying village characteristics it emerges that not just ex ante credit constraints but also the possibly low consumption outcomes when harvests fail discourage the application of fertilizer the lack of insurance causes inefficiency in production choices