a multi objective supplier selection model under stochastic demand conditions abstract supplier selection is a typical multi criteria decision problem attracting great attention recently cost quality delivery and flexibility are generally involved in the supplier selection decision making in this paper a measurement of supplier flexibility is extended to consider demand quantity and timing uncertainties comprehensively a multi objective supplier selection model is developed under stochastic demand conditions stochastic supplier selection is determined with simultaneous consideration of the total cost the quality rejection rate the late delivery rate and the flexibility rate involving constraints of demand satisfaction and capacity using a problem specific genetic algorithm computational results are presented

a survey of agricultural household models recent findings and policy implications semicommercial farms that produce multiple crops make up a large part of the agricultural sector in developing economies these farms or agricultural households combine two fundamental units of microeconomic analysis the household and the firm traditional economic theory has dealt with these units seperately but in developing economies in which peasant farms dominate their interdependence is of crucial importance researchers have developed models of agricultural households that combine producer and consumer behavior in a theoretically consistent fashion recent empirical applications of these models have extended them and expanded the range of policy issues which can be investigated using this general framework this article reports the results of empirical applications of this model in india indonesia japan the republic of korea malaysia nigeria senegal sierra leone taiwan and thailand it provides a comparative analysis of the policy implications of the approach for such matters as the welfare of farm households the size of marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services and for hired labor and the availability of budget revenues and foreign exchange

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

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

relative efficiency of cotton farms in sudanese irrigated agriculture abstract in this paper the lau yotopoulos profit function model is applied to data from the sudan with the objective of investigating the relative technical price and economic efficiency of different groups of cotton farms in the irrigated agricultural sub sector the findings of the paper lend no support to the marshallian based efficiency argument recently utilized by the sudanese government to abolish the joint account system in favor of the land water charge system in all irrigated schemes the findings also establish the economic efficiency superiority of farms under medium staple cotton relative to those under long staple cotton however the hypothesis of absolute price efficiency perfect profit maximization was rejected for all groups of cotton farms the latter result has a bearing on the familiar hypothesis that farmers in the less developed countries are efficient but poor

incorporating risk in production analysis risk is the farmer s perennial problem unfortunately agricultural economists have made little progress in analyzing or measuring production risk in ways that provide useful information for farm management therefore it is fair to say that the social returns to existing research on production risk are probably low it is from this perspective that i will discuss incorporating risk in production analysis my purpose is not to survey the literature or to catalog all the ways risk concepts have been incorporated in production models rather i intend to evaluate critically some of the basic concepts and approaches in the literature and to indicate the directions i believe research must take to arrive at a paradigm for incorporating risk in production analysis that could yield higher social returns in my view the conventional conceptual framework used for risk analysis has not led agricultural economists to ask the most important questions about the effects risk has on agricultural decision making the extension of the static neoclassical production model to incorporate price and production uncertainty has led agricultural economists to rationalize observed behavior in terms of the arrow pratt risk aversion concept this approach has led in turn to qualitative comparative static theorems which are appealing to theorists but have little relation to the decision problems farmers face to increase the relevance of their models and methods i believe agricultural economists need to understand specifically how risk affects agricultural production this in turn will suggest how risk affects agricultural decision making and why farmers are or should be concerned with it my analysis of these issues leads me to discount the hypothesis that risk matters primarily because of the psychic disutility it causes rather i hypothesize that risk matters primarily because production is a dynamic phenomenon and therefore production and price uncertainty affect expected productivity and expected income i hypothesize that these firstorder effects are why farmers are and should be concerned with risk the analysis of dynamic uncertain models shows that farmers optimal decisions are affected by risk whether they are risk neutral or risk averse this suggests that dynamic risk neutral models may be more useful than conventional static risk averse models for understanding the role production risk plays in farm management

theories of poverty traps and anti poverty policies in this paper we provide a conceptual overview of alternative mechanisms leading to poverty traps at the individual level making a distinction between those that are due to external frictions e g market failure and those that are due to behavior under extreme scarcity in the absence of any frictions we develop a common theoretical framework to examine alternative scenarios characterizing conditions under which poverty traps in the sense of multiple stable steady states arise as opposed to possibly conditional convergence to a unique steady state we apply this framework to discuss the relative merits of alternative anti poverty policies such as unconditional and conditional cash transfers and direct interventions aimed at improving market access to the poor or improving public service delivery jel codes d13 d23 o12 o15

employment horizon and the choice of performance measures empirical evidence from annual bonus plans of loss making entities we examine the extent to which employment horizon concerns affect the relative emphasis on financial versus nonfinancial performance measures in annual bonus plans we argue that managers of loss making firms are likely to voluntarily or forcibly depart in the near future and consequently have a shorter employment horizon loss making firms then need to increase the emphasis on forward looking nonfinancial performance measures to motivate long term effort of their managers thus we hypothesize that the emphasis on nonfinancial performance measures is greater in loss making than in profitable firms even after controlling for the informativeness of earnings we find consistent support for our hypothesis using different archival survey and field data sources and various proxies for short employment horizon and the emphasis on nonfinancial performance measures

profit supply and factor demand functions comment in lau and yotopoulos 1972 a new method of estimating production relations was developed building on lau and yotopoulos 1971 this method bringing together estimates of profit and factor demand functions was further developed in yotopoulos and lau to incorporate a test of rationality their method has since been applied by yotopoulos lau and lin sidhu sidhu and baanante 1979 1981 jamison and lau and junankar 1980a b 1982 because the assumption of rationality is so fundamental to economics and because few tests of this hypothesis exist the lau yotopoulos method is very important however these studies rest on advanced economic theory and sophisticated econometrics so it is easy to be intimidated by them sophisticated estimators however are not necessarily free from er

integrated safety stock optimization for multiple sourced stockpoints facing variable demand and lead time abstract the safety stock placement problem of a multi stage supply chain comprising multiple sourced stockpoints is addressed in this paper each stockpoint faces variability in its downstream demand and suppliers lead time the maximum among these suppliers lead time is determined by employing concepts of order statistics it is required to find the fill rate and safety stocks at each stockpoint that leads to satisfying the end customer service level at minimum safety stock placement cost hence the fill rates and the safety amounts are decided from a global supply chain perspective two models are proposed a decentralized safety stock placement model and a centralized consolidation model the decentralized model finds the safety amounts at each stockpoint required to face its underlying lead time demand variability the consolidation model finds the consolidated safety amounts that will be kept in the relevant consolidation center at each stage a benders decomposition technique is developed to handle the nonlinearity and binary restrictions involved in the safety stock consolidation model strategies proposed by the consolidation model achieve 45 2 62 reduction in safety amounts that results in a cost savings ranging between 22 2 44 2 as compared to the strategies proposed by the decentralized model

peasant supply response in rationed economies abstract when peasants do not have reliable access to goods on the black market government price controls may result in rationing of peasants demand for consumer goods we show that supply response is then perverse and that the economy may collapse as exports fall and rural shortages intensify such a crisis may initially be disguised as peasants sell export goods to build up money stocks we consider the policy options for governments facing such problems

parametric tests of allocative efficiency in the manufacturing sectors of india and pakistan this paper estimates allocative inefficiency in the manufacturing sectors of india and pakistan based on an extension of the translog profit function approach we propose a new method to the estimation of allocative inefficiency in two countries or groups the model is estimated using pooled annual data from the large scale manufacturing sectors of india and pakistan over the period 1959 87 we find evidence of allocative inefficiencies in both countries specifically results reveal that manufacturing firms in the two countries over utilize capital and raw materials relative to labour and energy the magnitude of over utilization of capital is more severe in pakistan than in india we argue that these findings are hardly surprising given the structure of factor markets and past government policies in the two countries

trade liberalisation and poverty what are the links this paper asks whether a developing country s own trade liberalisation could translate into increased poverty and what information would be required to identify whether it will do so it plots the channels through which such effects might operate identifying the static effects via four broad groups of institutions households distribution channels factor markets and government and the dynamic issues of volatility long term economic growth and short term adjustment stresses an increase in the price of something a household sells labour good service increases its welfare thus the paper first explores the likely effects of trade liberalisation on the prices of goods and services taking into account the distribution sector also critical is whether trade reform creates or destroys markets trade reform is also likely to affects factor prices of which the wages of the unskilled is the most important for poverty purposes if reform boosts the demand for labour intensive products it boosts the demand for labour and wages and or employment will increase however not all developing countries are relatively abundant in unskilled labour and trade can boost demand for semi skilled rather than unskilled labour hence poverty alleviation is not guaranteed trade reform can affect tariff revenue but much less frequently and adversely than is popularly imagined even if it does it is a political decision not a law of nature that the poor should suffer the resulting new taxes or cuts in government expenditure opening up the economy can reduce risk and variability because world markets are usually more stable than domestic ones but sometimes it will increase them because stabilisation schemes are undermined or because residents switch to riskier activities the non poor can generally tide themselves over adjustment shocks from a liberalisation so public policy should focus on whether the initially poor and near temporary setbacks the key to sustained poverty alleviation is economic growth there is little reason to fear that growth will not boost the incomes of the poor similarly while the argument that openness stimulates long run growth has still not been completely proven there is every presumption that it will

rural livelihood diversification in sub saharan africa a literature review abstractthis article provides a comprehensive review of the literature on the nature and evolution of rural livelihood diversification in sub saharan africa and the situation regarding smallholders it reveals mixed findings about the causes and consequences of livelihood diversification on rural smallholders adopting this strategy a lot of evidence from the literature suggests that it is relatively better off smallholders with sufficient assets who achieve successful livelihood diversification mainly by exploiting opportunities and synergies between farm and nonfarm activities because of asset constraints increase in incomes and wealth based on livelihood diversification has not yet benefitted the large majority of smallholders

fuelwood consumption and forest degradation a household model for domestic energy substitution in rural india this paper disusses domestic en ergy supply and demand in rural india links be tween forest scarcity and household fuel collec tion are analyzed in a non separable household model focusing on substitution of non commer cial fuels from the commons and the private do main based on data from villages bordering a protected area a novel maximum entropy ap proach is used for estimation it is found that households respond to forest scarcity and in creased fuelwood collection time by substituting fuels from private sources for forest fuelwood however the magnitude of the response appears insufficient to prevent current fuelwood collection practices from causing serious forest degrada tion jel q24

the economic efficiency of farmers growing high yielding irrigated rice in india the high yielding varieties program has been operating for some fifteen years in india as a result the modern technology is no longer a new technology particularly for irrigated rice farmers the issue addressed in this paper therefore is whether farmers producing high yielding varieties hyv of rice are doing so in an economically efficient manner or do substantial opportunities remain to increase the efficiency of the farmers application of modern rice technology to get an empirical answer and to assess better the economic performance of farmers a study area was chosen to approach ideal field conditions for implementation of the program economic performance can be measured by comparing the economic efficiencies of farmer groups small and large the profit function developed by yotopoulos and lau is used as an analytical tool to examine economic efficiency including technical and price efficiency for the empirical estimation of profit and variable factor demand functions a random sample of seventy farmers growing a hyv ir20 in rabi winter season 1977 78 was selected from a progressive village in the coimbatore district tamil nadu a favorably placed area in terms of irrigation administration paddy varieties and other such factors the total population of the village seyyampalayam consisted of about 55 of farmers having operational holdings of 1 hectare or less with an average of 0 64 hectare the other 45 had operational holdings of above 1 hectare with an average of 2 79 hectares accordingly equal representation was given to both groups 35 farmers each in our random sample defining a larger farmer as one with more than 1 hectare

spice price spikes simulating impacts of saffron price volatility in a gendered local economy wide model summary access to international markets provides smallholders with unprecedented opportunities but also exposes them to world market whims we use a local economy wide impact evaluation lewie model to analyze how the recent global saffron price variability affected morocco s taliouine taznakht region a specialized agro export economy with a stark gender division of labor prices of saffron increased by 71 per year over the 2007 09 period before falling quickly back to their trend our modeling approach allows us to simulate such shocks and evaluate impacts not only on producers but also on the local economies around them in our simulations positive price shocks and increases in productivity both cause large reallocations of labor resources particularly for female workers at harvest time we use monte carlo simulations to evaluate how saffron price variance affects the economy female wage income is especially sensitive to global price variability a 100 increase in saffron price variance leads to 133 increase in female wage income variance but only 36 for males accounting for general equilibrium effects is critical for understanding the ramifications of exposure to export price volatility in poor economies

a bilinear goal programming model and a modified benders decomposition algorithm for supply chain reconfiguration and supplier selection abstract the problem addressed in this paper is related to an aerospace company seeking to change its outsourcing strategies in order to meet the expected demand increase and customer satisfaction requirements regarding delivery dates and amounts a bilinear goal programming model is developed to achieve the company s objectives a modified benders decomposition method is successfully applied to handle bilinear goal programming models in which the complicating binary variables affect the values of the deviational variables of goals attainment this influence leads to formulate the master and the sub problem as two goal programming models with different objective function decompositions as compared to the classical benders one computational experiments show that the modified benders algorithm outperforms a generic linearization method by reaching the optimal solution for larger problem with about 75 reduction in computation time

technical efficiency in developing country agriculture a meta analysis abstract a meta analysis is performed to review empirical estimates of technical efficiency te in developing country agriculture the objective of the study is to contribute to a better understanding of the factors that influence estimates of mean te a data set of 51 observations of te from 32 studies is used in order to test if specific characteristics of the data and econometric specifications account for systematic differences in the efficiency estimates results using the two limit tobit procedure indicate that factors such as primal versus dual number of fixed inputs and number of variable inputs increase average te estimates on the other hand using the cobb douglas functional form and cross sectional data yields a lower level of te other factors including the number of variables in the model crop type stochastic versus deterministic frontiers and sample size do not seem to significantly affect estimates of te across studies

small enterprise and firm level technical efficiency in the indonesian garment industry this paper examines technical efficieny in the indonesian garment industry based on the country s 1986 census of small industry drawing on a sample of 2250 firms our analysis suggests that inter firm variations in efficiency are very considerable the paper then investigates the correlates of these variations finding in particular a positive correlation between technical efficiency and each of export orientation financial integration and female participation in the workforce it is also found that there is a significant level of labour capital substitution in the industry

modeling the impact of agricultural growth and government policy on income distribution in india this article uses a limited general equilibrium model to investigate the growth and equity effects of a variety of economic and technical changes and selected agricultural policies in india it explores how changes in food prices rural wages and farm profits associated with the green revolution period affected income distribution between net buyers and sellers of food the model shows that income gains from the green revolution initially accrued to the wealthier rural groups but that after 1972 73 they were transferred to urban consumers and that by 1980 81 the per capita incomes of poor and wealthier rural groups alike were barely above their respective 1960 61 levels the model is also used in counterfactual analysis of the impact of changes in technological demographic investment taxation and income redistribution variables its findings indicate the importance of trade policies for the nature of the equity outcomes from agricultural growth and suggest that a reduction in population growth and an increase in nonagricultural employment and income are required to convert agricultural growth into reduced rural poverty

estimating farm level input demand and wheat supply in the indian punjab using a translog profit function application of the translog profit function to farm level data from punjab india allowed a more disaggregated analysis of the farm production structure compared to the case of cobb douglas formulation the flexibility afforded by translog formulation permitted measurement of the different impacts that exogenous variables have within and across input demand and output supply functions policy relevant elasticity estimates with respect to variable inputs and output prices fixed inputs a few soil related state of nature variables measured by soil analysis and education which are usually considered constraints to farm production were obtained and two examples of policy applications were developed

the philippines roll on roll off policy and its impact on household income abstractour paper captures the immediate impact of the roll on roll off policy that offered an alternative system of inter island transfer within the philippines it provides evidence on the effect

village banking and maternal and child health evidence from ecuador and honduras abstract many microcredit institutions bundle credit with health education or other programs this paper reviews arguments on such tie ins and concludes that net benefits are possible but requires empirical testing quasi experimental data from project hope s health banks and credit only village banks are then examined the paper presents evidence that health practices do not improve automatically with greater wealth in honduras results show that health bank participation is robustly associated with reduced subsequent conditional child diarrhea probability but in no specification does credit only bank participation have this effect in ecuador results suggest a larger effect of credit only banks in both countries health bank participation significantly raises subsequent healthcare over credit only participation and at least reduces the tendency to switch from breast feeding to bottle feeding as income rises effects on expenditures are ambiguous there is no clear link between tie ins and bank performance

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

are agricultural markets more developed around cities testing for urban heterogeneity in separability in tanzania abstract a key question for policymakers concerned about feeding sub saharan africa s ssa rapidly growing cities is whether or not nearby farms benefit from improved agricultural markets evidence from case studies and agricultural location theory suggest so but urban heterogeneity has not yet been found in a common economic test of functioning agricultural markets the separability result the test is based on a key insight of the agricultural household model which finds that a farm s profit should be maximized independently from household utility given perfect factor markets i e separability but not so if the household faces at least two market failures i e non separability in this paper i test for geographic heterogeneity in separability between rural peri urban and urban districts using 2014 15 data from the world bank s living standards measurement study and integrated surveys on agriculture lsms isa from tanzania i find strong evidence that the correlation between pre harvest labor demand and household size implying non separability in rural areas is significantly weaker in three of tanzania s five largest cities dar es salaam arusha and mbeya given certain assumptions this can be interpreted as evidence of increased agricultural market functionality around these cities relative to rural areas overall these results contribute to the debate on how to achieve urban food security in ssa and give some validity to agricultural location theory and the separability test as tools to help policymakers characterize the nature of agricultural factor markets

estimation of multicrop production functions this paper considers whether separability or nonjointness is the better approach for attaining tractability for multicrop production function estimation characteristics of agricultural production associated with allocated inputs physical constraints and output determination imply sufficient nonjointness for estimation whereas separability is less plausible the paper also addresses estimation of production functions with allocated inputs where allocations are not observed and demonstrates a proposed approach by way of example

implications of non farm work to vulnerability to food poverty recent evidence from northern ghana summary using survey data from northern ghana this study seeks to establish the impact of participation in non farm work on the vulnerability of resource poor households to food poverty vulnerability to food poverty is assessed based on expected future food expenditure of households the potential endogeneity problem associated with participation in non farm work by households is overcome using a novel instrumental variable approach analysis of the determinants of expected future food expenditure is done using a standard feasible generalized least squares fgls method demographic and socioeconomic variables location variables and household facilities are included in the model as control variables our study finds that participation in non farm work significantly increased the future expected food consumption thereby alleviating the vulnerability of households to food poverty our study also confirms that current food poverty and future food poverty i e vulnerability to food poverty are not independent from each other non farm work plays a crucial role in providing the means to overcome the risk of food poverty in these resource poor households policies that promote off farm income generating activities such as small businesses and self employment as well as the creation and support of businesses that absorb extra labor from the farm should be encouraged in the study region because households in the study region are exposed to above average levels of hunger and food poverty the study recommends the government of ghana and development partners to take measures that enhance the resilience of these resource poor households

sovereignty credible commitments and economic prosperity on american indian reservations abstract american indian reservations are islands of poverty in a sea of wealth because this poverty cannot be explained solely by natural resource physical and human capital constraints institutions are likely to be part of the explanation one of the institutional variables is the sovereign power of tribes which allows tribal governments to act opportunistically the potential for such opportunistic behavior can thwart economic development if tribes are unable to make credible commitments to stable contract enforcement one avenue for credible commitments is public law 280 which required some tribes to turn judicial jurisdiction over civil disputes to the states in which they reside using data for 1969 99 we find that per capita income for american indians on reservations subject to state jurisdiction grew significantly more than it did for indians who were not

sequential decision making in production models single equation estimates of production models usually are justified by the assumption that production inputs are chosen as part of a one period decision problem yet most production decisions in agriculture are made sequentially in this paper the farmer s optimal input choices are modeled as optimal controls in a stochastic control problem a two period cobb douglas example is used to show that sequential solutions to production problems may yield models which require either single equation or simultaneous equation estimators functional separability stochastic specification and behavior under uncertainty are discussed in the context of dynamic production models

can union labor ever cost less this paper examines the effect of unions on efficiency by estimating cost function systems over three different sets of construction projects the results show that union contractors have greater economies of scale this gives them a cost advantage in large commercial office buildings but in school and hospital construction nonunion contractors have lower costs at all output levels despite the cost differences profits for nonunion contractors in school and hospital construction are no higher than those for union contractors because the burden of higher union costs is shifted to buyers

land property rights and international migration evidence from mexico abstract in this paper i ask whether there is a relationship between land property rights and international migration in order to identify the impact of property rights i consider a country wide land certification program that took place in mexico in the 1990s my identification strategy exploits the staggered implementation and the households eligibility for the program i find that the program increased the eligible households likelihood of having one or more members abroad by 12 in terms of the number of migrants my coefficient estimates explain 26 of the 1994 1997 increase in migrants from ejido areas and 13 15 of the increase from all of mexico consistent with our theoretical model the impact is strongest for households without a land will this implies that land inheritance issues drive at least part of the effect

farm size tenure and economic efficiency in a sample of illinois grain farms apparently teague has not reviewed all of the literature for examining relative efficiency in the early work of lau and yotopoulos ly differences in economic efficiency are tested by incorporating only a dummy variable in the profit function to quantify differences associated with particular groups teague implicitly argues that only this should have been done as evidenced by the assertion that equations 2 and 3 are redundant in an extension of this early work yotopoulos and lau yl expand their conceptual framework to permit the assessment of relative technical and pricing efficiency as well as overall economic efficiency this latter framework is utilized by garcia sonka and yoo under this formulation the profit functions of the two firms or groups under analysis differ by a constant factor which is a function of technical and pricing efficiency in addition the demand equations may differ across groups by constant factors which are a function of pricing efficiency similar formulations also are presented in trosper o connor and hammonds and khan and maki perhaps teague s difficulty arises from either a misunderstanding of the methodology or an unfamiliarity with the approach and its standard notation in the former case the methodology permits tests for the relative efficiency pricing and economic without imposing it that is actual uop and demand functions can be derived based on behavioral relationships differences in actual functions permit an assessment of relative efficiency in the latter producers respond to effective prices profits and demand equations are derived based on these effective prices not actual prices the p s in garcia sonka and yoo can be shown to represent an underlying structure that permits differences in efficiency between the groups based on effective prices to understand the logic behind this formulation consider the concept of relative efficiency developed by yl this approach begins with the notion that given comparable endowments identical technology and normalized input prices the actual profits of two firms should be identical if they both maximize profits to the extent that one is more price efficient or technically more efficient than the other the normalized profits will differ even for the same normalized input prices and endowments of fixed inputs the actual normalized profit functions will then be different consider the case of the production functions of two firms 4 y aif x zi and r2 a2f x2 z2 where the x s and z s are variable and fixed inputs respectively a1 and a2 are scalar technical efficiency parameters and the superscripts represent the two firms the marginal conditions can be represented by

general equilibrium with parallel markets for goods and foreign exchange theory and application to ghana abstract this paper presents a simple model of a distorted economy with parallel markets which is motivated by the ghanaian experience the model has simultaneous illegal trade in goods and foreign exchange markets its general equilibrium determines the black market foreign exchange rate and the price of consumer goods after determining some comparative statics the predictions are tested on ghanaian monthly data from 1982 1983 the empirical results are shown to be consistent with those from the theoretical model

the determinants of nonfarm income diversification in rural peru abstract this paper shows that in peruvian rural areas there has been substantial growth over the past decade in household employment outside of own farming at present 51 of the net income of rural households comes from these off farm activities and thus they certainly cannot be considered as marginal the reasons households diversify their incomes are several access to public assets such as roads and private assets such as education and credit is an important factor in diversification increasing access to these assets will help rural households to increase their self employment as well as wage employment in the nonfarm sector

dynamic agency with renegotiation and managerial tenure this paper proves the renegotiation proofness principle for a dynamic len linear contracts exponential utility normal distributions model and examines the impact of repeated renegotiation on incentives and managerial tenure when performance information is serially correlated in addition to providing a general solution to a multiperiod agency problem with serially correlated performance measures this paper characterizes optimal managerial tenure turnover policies as a function of the time series properties of performance measures with negatively correlated performance measures the principal prefers longer managerial tenure and no turnover is optimal with positively correlated performance measures absent a switching cost turnover every period is optimal in the presence of a fixed switching cost interior optimal turnover policies exist if the performance measures are positively correlated switching costs are necessary but not sufficient for interior optimal tenure the optimal turnover policies present an alternative to theories of performance driven managerial turnover and are consistent with evidence that a majority of managerial turnovers are age related normal retirements

the response of peasant farmers to price incentives the use and misuse of profit functions recent famines in chad ethiopia and the sudan have highlighted a major problem facing less developed countries how does an ldc become self sufficient in food production the answers to this question range from the narrowly defined economic one or economistic approach to the more widely based institutional reforms approach the former approach typified by say schultz 1964 or the world bank 1982 would emphasise the importance of mainly price incentives the latter approach as typified by myrdal 1968 in his monumental work asian drama would emphasise the importance of land reforms as a pre condition for agricultural development the debate has sometimes followed a misleading path and discussed whether peasants are rational or whether they are lazy inert tradition bound etc the aim of this article is to show that the use of profit functions to model peasant behaviour in ldcs is seriously flawed neo classical economic theory within which profit functions are embodied ignores the historical social institutional and political context within which peasant farmers operate peasant farmers do not operate in full blooded capitalist impersonal competitive input and output markets the article is structured as follows section ii outlines the profit function approach and section iii provides a survey and critique of applications of the profit function to ldc agriculture section iv concludes with some general remarks on analysing peasant behaviour in an alternative paradigm

empirical estimation and use of risk preferences an appraisal of estimation methods that use actual economic decisions the topic addressed in this paper concerns the conceptual basis estimation procedures and resources required for implementation of methods for estimating risk preferences by observing behavior an attempt is made to review and appraise previous literature as well as to explore some alternative approaches to begin it is important to contrast four general types of empirical settings of interest these are micro farm level macro market or other aggregations descriptive positivistic and prescriptive normative studies the prescriptive or conditionally normative studies seemingly have dominated agricultural economic studies of risk these generally have been micro in nature and have focused on

efficiency estimation in a profit maximising model using flexible production function abstract this paper uses a flexible translog production function to estimate efficiency of 227 farms from west bengal india we consider estimation of technical and allocative inefficiencies using a profit maximising framework which accommodates both endogenous and exogenous inputs the maximum likelihood method of estimation developed in this paper is based on the production function and the first order conditions of profit maximisation farm specific technical and allocative inefficiencies are also estimated empirical results show that the mean level of technical efficiency is 75 46 while the best farm is 85 87 efficient technically so far as allocative efficiency is concerned the majority of the farms are found to be under users of the endogenous inputs viz fertiliser manure human and bullock labour

labor supply the family and poverty the s shaped labor supply curve abstract the canonical model of labor supply is extended to account for subsistence needs and a frequently rigid division of labor within families gender various theories that have been put forward are thus reconciled in particular with respect to the distinct work choices of the poor the model predicts negative labor supply elasticities for secondary workers at low wage rates and positive ones at higher rates but near 0 for primary workers at all levels detailed time allocation data of the rural philippines support these conclusions as well as evidence from other studies including of industrialized countries policy implications are briefly discussed

agent employment horizons and contracting demand for forward looking performance measures in this paper the principal rewards an agent s farsighted effort both in the short and long term with the short term reward based on a noisy forward looking performance measure and the long term reward based on a potentially less noisy trailing performance measure the main result is that optimal contracting weights depend on the agent s employment time horizon the shorter the agent s employment horizon the greater the emphasis on the forward looking performance measure and vice versa this implies that contracting on forward looking performance measures can be valuable in mitigating any adverse long term effects of employees myopically focusing on short term trailing performance measures

farm size relative efficiency and agrarian policy in cote d ivoire profit function analysis of rice farms abstract this paper examines the relative economic efficiency of small and large rice farms in cote d ivoire using a profit function approach no differences in the relative economic efficiency of small and large farms were found this conclusion is robust under alternative model specifications agrarian reforms directed towards further concentration of landholding for large farms in cote d ivoire cannot be justified based on economic efficiency results show that access to credit and use of modern rice varieties significantly increase profits to improve technical efficiency of rice farms an accelerated program to provide information credit improved seeds and other inputs is needed when all the farms i e large and small are taken together there is evidence of allocative inefficiency strategies are needed to remove such management related inefficiencies in rice production either through the development of a better market price information system or effective farmer oriented technical training programs by rice extension workers

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

colonist land allocation decisions land use and deforestation in the ecuadorian amazon frontier as one of the last agricultural frontiers of the humid tropics amazonia is the largest area of the world currently undergoing frontier settlement although the earliest intrusions of foreign populations into amazonia date from pre hispanic times the large scale entrance of peasant colonists into the vast region is a recent phenomenon much of this movement represents the spontaneous migration of peoples but governments in the region have also become increasingly interested in opening up and integrating amazonia to national and international economies these actions are frequently seen as potential solutions to a number of national problems including the need to increase agricultural production correct spatial imbalances in the distribution of population exploit frontier lands for reasons of national security and defuse potentially serious political problems resulting from the existing agrarian structure landlessness and unemployment the upper basin of the amazon in ecuador bordering on the eastern slopes of the andes is one such area of frontier settlement recent decades have witnessed the rapid conversion of these amazonian forests to agricultural uses through a series of schemes bearing such labels as land development and colonization most forest intervention in the region has come at the hands of colonist farmers attempting to establish land claims along transport routes originally constructed to aid in petroleum exploration and exploitation these are farmers who formerly have made a living in long established farmlands and who for various reasons population pressures pervasive poverty maldistribution of farmland lack of inputs for intensive cultivation lack of nonagrarian livelihood opportunities and generally inadequate rural development have been increasingly squeezed out of their homelands a marginal person by virtue of his low socioeconomic and political status the farmer often perceives

a model of an agricultural household in a multi crop economy the case of korea it is the purpose of this paper to describe one method of extending the empirical applicability of the theory of the farm household to multi crop economies by integrating the econometric and linear programming models already available in the literature section i introduces the subject in section ii the theoretical model is presented in section iii korean data are used to assess the quantitative significance of the approach by calculating and comparing household response to changes in input and output prices for two different specifications of the models first the household is analyzed from the consumption side on the assumption that farm profits are exogenous this corresponds to the standard approach in consumer demand theory and second results are presented for a model in which consumption and production responses are integrated in a theoretically consistent fashion and farm profits are allowed to reflect production responses to price changes the results from this and other studies that use an integrated approach to production and consumption decisions highlight the need to change perceptions concerning agricultural household response to economic incentives in developing countries and to revise the design of economic projects and policies accordingly