finance and growth in a bank based economy is it quantity or quality that matters abstract most finance growth studies approximate the size of financial systems rather than the quality of intermediation to explain economic growth differentials furthermore the neglect of systematic differences in cross country studies could drive the result that finance matters we suggest a measure of bank s intermediation quality using bank specific efficiency estimates and focus on the regions of one economy only germany this quality measure has a significantly positive effect on growth this result is robust to the exclusion of banks operating in multiple regions controlling for the proximity of financial markets when distinguishing different banking sectors active in germany and when excluding the structurally weaker east from the sample

economic liberalization and sources of productivity growth in indonesian banks is it efficiency improvement or technological progress abstractthis article investigates the sources of productivity growth in the indonesian banking sector during 23 years period from 1993 to 2015 the industry has gone through several episodes of policy reforms starting from the radical deregulation in the late 1980s the restructuring period following the 1997 asian financial crisis the consolidation period in the mid 2000s to the economic expansion in the 2010s using panel data of 98 commercial banks we explore productivity growth using malmquist indices complemented with bootstrapping technique to provide measures of the statistical precision of the results the malmquist index measures total factor productivity efficiency change and technological change results show that productivity improves moderately and appears to be less volatile towards the end of the period furthermore efficiency change tends to be the main source of productivity improvement rather than technological change

financial deregulation and productivity growth in banking sector empirical evidence from bangladesh this article examines the effects of regulatory reform on productivity growth in the bangladesh banking industry we use a unique balanced panel dataset comprising bank level annual data from the e

post reform forestland markets in china land markets developed rapidly in china after agricultural land tenure reforms but not after forest reforms we surveyed farmers in three provinces to examine the post reform forestland markets and options to strengthen them using household choice experiments we estimate land market demand and supply under alternative contractual arrangements our findings are consistent with the currently thin markets but also suggest that alternative institutional and contractual conditions could support broader participation in land markets strengthening property rights on forestland emerges as an especially effective possible policy instrument we illustrate its predicted effects on equilibrium rental rates and market participation

sensitivity analysis of efficiency and malmquist productivity indices an application to spanish savings banks abstract hypothesis testing and statistical precision in the context of non parametric efficiency and productivity measurement have been investigated since the early 1990s recent contributions focus on this matter through the use of resampling methods i e bootstrapping techniques however empirical evidence is still practically non existent this gap is more noticeable in the case of banking efficiency studies where the literature is immense in this work we explore productivity growth and productive efficiency for spanish savings banks over the initial post deregulation period 1992 1998 using data envelopment analysis dea and bootstrapping techniques results show that productivity growth has occurred mainly due to improvement in production possibilities and that mean efficiency has remained fairly constant over time the bootstrap analysis yields further evidence as for many firms productivity growth or decline is not statistically significant with regard to efficiency measurement the bootstrap reveals that the disparities in the original efficiency scores of some firms are lessened to a great extent

a model of the financial firm with imperfect asset and deposit elasticities abstract the paper develops an intertemporal model to estimate the production technology of financial firms such as banks price taking is testable in each separate market for assets and liabilities and competitive price taking is a nested special case such tests are applied both to outputs and inputs empirical results for a sample of banks in new york and new jersey indicate that price taking applies only in markets for labor and time deposits in markets for loans demand deposits cash and materials the price taking hypothesis is not accepted

technological change rediscovering the engine of productivity growth in china s rural economy abstract this paper focuses on measuring the relative importance of the role of technology versus that of institutional innovation in china s rural economy a six equation rice sector model explaining provincial level technology adoption yield and factor demand are econometrically estimated using data from china s 13 rice growing provinces for the period 1975 1990 growth decomposition analysis identifies technology adoption as the most important determinant of rice yield growth during 1978 1984 accounting for nearly 40 percent the change institutional reform accounted for 35 percent of the growth in 1985 1990 technology accounts for all of the increase in rice yields the study demonstrates earlier studies may have over estimated the impact of decollectivization

the creation and spread of technology and total factor productivity in china s agriculture the overall goal of this study is to create a framework for assessing the trends of china s national and international investment in agricultural research and to measure its impact on total factor productivity the main methodological contribution is to provide more convincing measures of crop specific technologies from china s national research program and of those imported from the international agricultural research system our results find that from 1980 to 1995 china s total factor productivity for rice wheat and maize grew rapidly and new technology accounts for most of the productivity growth

specialization diversification and productivity a panel data analysis of rice farms in korea this article examines the microeconomics of productivity associated with specialization diversification in production activities with an application to korean rice farms korean rice farms tend to be very small and highly specialized our analysis examines the productivity effects associated with both farm size and farm specialization diversification in korean agriculture relying on farm level panel data the analysis studies farm productivity in a multi input multi output context accounting not only for changes in inputs and technical change in rice production but also for the role of diversification in the production of other crops in current and previous periods we find positive but small productivity gains from farm diversification these gains come mostly from complementarity effects across farm outputs with minimal effect of scale economies the positive complementarity effects work against nonconvexity effects which provide strong productivity incentives for rice farms to specialize

the evolution of cost productivity and efficiency among us credit unions abstract advances in information processing technology have eroded the advantages of small scale and proximity to customers that traditionally enabled small lenders to thrive nonetheless the membership and market share of us credit unions have increased though their average size has also risen we investigate changes in the efficiency and productivity of us credit unions during 1989 2006 by benchmarking the performance of individual firms against an estimated order quantile lying near the efficient frontier we construct a cost analog of the malmquist productivity index which we decompose to estimate changes in cost and scale efficiency and changes in technology we find that cost productivity fell on average across all credit unions but especially among smaller credit unions smaller credit unions confronted a shift in technology that increased the minimum cost required to produce given amounts of output all but the largest credit unions also became less scale efficient over time

efficiency of american states after implementation of the patient protection and affordable care act ppaca from 2014 to 2017 abstractwe assess the impact of healthcare efficiency among u s states after implementation of the ppaca a malmquist index decomposes productivity changes of state healthcare systems since 2014

corporate governance and efficiency in banking evidence from emerging economies abstractthis article investigates the impact of corporate governance on bank efficiency across a sample of 139 commercial banks from 17 countries of central and eastern europe during the period 200

the dominance of inefficiencies over scale and product mix economies in banking abstract this study measures and analyzes inefficiencies for all u s banks in 1984 inefficiencies are measured relative to a thick frontier cost function and are found to dominate measured scale and product mix economies most inefficiencies are operational in nature involving the overuse of physical inputs rather than financial involving overpayment of interest also technical inefficiencies proportionate overuse of all inputs dominate allocative inefficiencies improper mix of inputs these results suggest that competitive pressures in banking from deregulation will be focused primarily on banks that do not control costs rather than on those of a particular size or product mix

scale and scope economies in the multi product banking firm abstract the multi product nature of the banking firm is examined utilizing the translog cost function this analysis indicates that contrary to conventional wisdom natural monopoly scale economies and product specific decreasing costs are not robust characterizations of the banking industry there is however evidence that the cost function is characterized by economies of scope the implications of these results are discussed and extensions of this approach suggested

the rapid rise of china s dairy sector factors behind the growth in demand and supply with the rapid growth in china s dairy industry a number of recent papers have addressed either the supply or the demand trends for dairy products in china none however presents a systematic explanation for the recent growth in both the supply and demand for dairy products the goal of this paper is to sketch a more comprehensive picture of china s dairy sector and to assess the nature of the sector s development in the coming decades drawing upon several empirical studies we examine the trends in dairy product consumption to create a composite picture of the factors underlying the recent growth we also empirically investigate the sources of production gains in milk supply and assess the relative importance of expanding herd size changes in the nature of production technological change and improvements in efficiency to the overall growth of milk production

scale economies in banking a restructuring and reassessment the issue of scale economies in banking has a rich history most earlier studies report modest operating cost scale economies for small institutions those with less than about 50 million of deposits in 1968 dollars but are unclear where these economies might end if at all unfortunately these studies are limited in four important respects first those that were well specified did not measure the total cost of banking operations but concentrated on estimating scale economies for individual banking functions e g demand deposits separately from commercial loans second an average cost curve that could take a u shape over the full range of banks was not fitted either because larger banks were not included or because of the functional form used cobb douglas consequently the optimum or minimum cost size of a bank or office could not be determined third the variables measuring the costs of branching were misspecified fourth the branch

productivity growth in large us commercial banks the initial post deregulation experience abstract we explore productivity growth for a group of 201 large us commercial banks over the initial post deregulation period from 1984 to 1990 using data envelopment analysis dea we measure productivity growth using malmquist productivity indexes and isolate the contributions of technical change technical efficiency change and scale change to productivity growth we find overall productivity growth at the rate of about 4 5 per year on average but productivity declined by 7 61 between 1984 and 1985 and by 0 33 between 1988 and 1989 our second stage panel regressions reveal that larger asset size and specialization of product mix associate with higher productivity growth while higher equity to assets associates with lower productivity growth

china s food economy to the twenty first century supply demand and trade this paper accounts for the structural changes now taking place in china and suggests that china is not likely to become either an enormous importer or exporter of grain ultimately though china s grain balances will depend on decisions made by chinese policymakers rather than natural resource constraints p v this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

distribution of cost and profit efficiency evidence from indian banking this paper uses the nonparametric dea methodology to estimate cost and profit efficiency of indian banks during the post reform period the results show considerable variation in average levels of profit efficiency across various ownership categories of banks in general state owned banks are found to be more efficient than their private counter parts further efficiency tends to be low among the small banks assets up to rs 50 billion indicating that at the existing scale of operations these banks are operating far below the efficient frontier we also examine the distribution of efficiency using nonparametric kernel density estimates the analysis reveals a rightward shift of the efficiency distribution over the years a major part of this shift comes from the state owned banks based on the conditional distribution the study finds strong evidence of ownership explaining the efficiency differential of banks additionally bank size and product mix are also found to be important although to a lesser extent

corruption soundness of the banking sector and economic growth a cross country study abstract this paper explores the impact of corruption on both the banking sector and economic growth we determine the impact using 76 macroeconomic data from various countries over the period 2002 2004 the results of various cross sectional regressions provide substantial evidence that corruption significantly aggravates the problems with bad loans in the banking sector in this study we also find some evidence of a new channel through which corruption lowers economic growth corruption distorts the allocation of bank funds from normal projects to bad projects which decreases the quality of private investments hence it decreases economic growth

prohibition of factor market exchanges and technological choice in chinese agriculture this article constructs a model of technological choice in an economy where market exchanges in land and labour are prohibited empirical data on demand for tractors tractor usage and chemical fertilisers in china are employed to test several hypotheses derived from the theoretical model the theory implies that the impact of relative factor scarcity on the pattern of technological choice in such an economy is similar to that in a market economy as postulated by the hicks ruttan hayami binswanger hypothesis of induced technological change the empirical evidence is found to be consistent with the implications of the model

the technical efficiency of us banks abstract the paper uses a non parametric frontier approach to measure the technical efficiency of a sample of u s banks the results indicate that these banks could have produced the same level of output with only 70 of the inputs actually used in addition most of this inefficiency is due to pure technical inefficiency wasting inputs rather than scale inefficiency operating at non constant returns to scale finally regression analysis indicates that the technical efficiency of the banks is positively related to size negatively related to product diversity and not at all related to the extent to which branch banking is allowed

agricultural supply response a survey abstract this paper surveys the literature on agricultural supply response to prices in developing countries empirical estimates of elasticities depend both on the methodology adopted and on country specific factors relating to technology economic structure and macro constraints the paper seeks to establish some general conclusions on supply responsiveness within these limitations supply response to output prices at the aggregate and at the crop levels is considered first crop specific acreage elasticities range between zero and 0 8 in the short run while long run elasticities tend to be higher between 0 3 and 1 2 yield elasticities are smaller and less stable than acreage elasticities clearly inter crop pricing can be relied upon to effect shifts in the commodity composition of agricultural output evidence also suggests that supply elasticities vary systematically with such factors as price and yield risks multiple cropping the importance of the crop farm incomes farm size tenancy and literacy the most controversial and important aspect of supply response is the effect on aggregate agricultural output of agriculture s terms of trade conventional time series estimates range from 0 1 to 0 3 a major cross country study reports an aggregate elasticity as high as 1 66 it is argued that cross country estimates are apt to exaggerate aggregate responsiveness while time series studies underestimate it somewhat for ldcs a tentative range of 0 4 to 0 5 seems plausible hence the distributive effects of the terms of trade are likely to be more significant than the allocative effects asian evidence shows that only a third of the inter country differences in fertilizer use can be attributed to fertilizer price policies provided new technologies and infrastructure are in place fertilizer subsidies can help in technology diffusion and in over coming credit constraints the choice between price supports and input subsidies will depend on a variety of country or situation specific factors nevertheless a significant general factor favoring price supports is that they can more easily be coupled with price stabilization goals than input subsidies though sparse the available evidence on the response of marketed surplus suggests that price policy is not a reliable instrument for regulating inter sectoral trade

the impact of china s economic reforms on agricultural productivity growth this paper presents a method for assessing the relative importance of price increases and strengthened individual incentives due to the introduction of the responsibility system for the post 1978 increase in china s agricultural productivity data on post 1978 chinese agricultural performance suggest that a little over three quarters of the measured productivity increase is due to payment system changes and the remainder to price increases we also use our method to calculate incentive indices giving an estimate of the fraction of their marginal product that peasants received under the pre 1978 regime

the household responsibility system reform and the adoption of hybrid rice in china abstract this paper studies the diffusion of hybrid rice before and after the recent institutional change from the collective team system to the household based farming system in rural china a simple model which treats the adoption of hybrid rice as a portfolio selection problem is presented the model is tested against time series cross county data collected from hunan province in south china the empirical evidence suggests that 1 adoption behavior in the collective system was not consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model this evidence indicates the existence of administrative intervention in influencing production decisions in the collective system 2 there was a significant change in the structure of the adoption function following the transition from the collective system to the household based system and 3 adoption behavior in the household system is consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model

irrigation agricultural performance and poverty reduction in china the overall goal of our paper is to understand the impact that irrigation in china has had on grain production and incomes in general and income and poverty alleviation in poor areas in particular the paper seeks to meet three objectives first we describe the relationship among irrigation status yields and household crop revenue second we seek to understand the magnitude and nature of the effect that irrigation has on yields and crop revenue finally we seek to understand the impact that irrigation has on incomes in poor areas our analysis shows that irrigation contributes to increases in yields for almost all crops and in income for farmers in all areas the importance of crop income in poor areas and the strong relationship between crop revenue and irrigation provides evidence of the importance of irrigation in past and future poverty alleviation in china we also show that in the majority of the villages that invested in new irrigation returns are positive even after accounting for increases in capital and production costs 2005 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

plan and market in china s agricultural commerce this article examines interactions between markets and state commercial planning in the context of china s agricultural sector it begins with a discussion of recent trends in agricultural planning and commerce in china and then presents a theoretical model that analyzes the way that a mixed commercial system of the sort observed in china functions the theoretical analysis suggests that a mixed system is sustainable and can have desirable efficiency and distributional effects markets however limit the range of sustainable plans and in the presence of markets state planning may no longer directly influence production and consumption behavior

decollectivization collective legacy and uneven agricultural development in china summary china has seen persistent regional inequality in agricultural productivity since it dismantled its rural collectives in the early 1980s this paper evaluates the effects of collective legacies on the agricultural performance after decollectivization we construct a collective legacy index cli based on the achievements in the areas of rural infrastructure education and health under collectives using a district level panel dataset we find that the cli has long term positive effects on agricultural development after decollectivization that is districts that already performed well under socialism could still succeed under a different institution because they had superior infrastructure and human capital at the same time districts with less successful experience under socialism are less likely to catch up even after dismantling the collective institutions the results with an instrumental variable the pace of decollectivization further reinforce this conclusion we therefore argue that different collective legacies contribute to the uneven development in rural china to tackle its problems of regional inequality china needs to appreciate the role of its collective legacies in development

towards a better climate treaty the kyoto protocol is an example of how not to construct a treaty negotiators began by focusing on the short term agreeing that the industrialized countries should cut their emissions of greenhouse gases by about 5 relative to 1990 by 2008 2012 then they agreed that these cuts should be achieved cost effectively incorporating flexible mechanisms only later did they worry about whether the treaty created incentives for broad participation and full compliance negotiators should have approached things the other way around they should have begun by thinking of how they could achieve both broad participation and full compliance and of how they could reduce emissions in the long term had they done so a better more effective treaty would have been negotiated in this essay the author explains why kyoto is unlikely to succeed in mitigating climate change he also proposes an alternative treaty design that is likely to work better

marketing reforms market development and agricultural production in china abstract chinese agricultural reforms have consisted of two transitional stages initially decollectivization in the late 1970s followed by market liberalization in the mid 1980s while much research has been conducted on the initial stage of increasing the incentives for farmers in collective cultivation little quantitative evidence exists on how marketing reforms and the development of rural markets has affected agricultural production decisions using more accurate and disaggregated measures of the reform and market development components of liberalization than previous research this study examined the effects of these liberalization policies on the agricultural production decisions in shaanxi province procurement quota levels were found to be positively associated with the area planted to grain crops thus quotas represent an effective way of increasing grain production and thereby also a means of achieving food self sufficiency which remains an important policy objective for the chinese government the involvement of state grain stations in free market grain trade and the expansion of rural markets has increased the area planted to the two potential cash crops soybeans and wheat and reduced the sown area of the subsistence crop corn reflecting the reduced need to plant corn as a self insurance mechanism for smoothing consumption an increase in procurement quotas increases fertilizer use on grain crops due to the policy of linking quotas to access to below market priced fertilizer but decreases the use of labor which shifts to other more profitable enterprises market development has increased these off farm employment opportunities and the earnings associated with them thereby promoting the shift of labor out of crop production and increased the use of fertilizer which has also become more available

the decomposition of total factor co2 emission efficiency of 97 contracting countries in paris agreement abstract greenhouse gas reduction requires joint efforts from the global society while improving co2 emission efficiency is a centrally important means to realize emission reduction targets therefore it is of strategic importance to identify main influential factors to co2 emission efficiency of different countries by considering the technology heterogeneity the originality herein lies in that applying the modified decomposition method of metafrontier malmquist luenberger index mml to define the priority of contracting countries in paris agreement to improve emission efficiency in this study 97 contracting countries of paris agreement are divided into 4 groups according to levels of income low income countries lower middle income countries upper middle income countries and high income countries and studied with their input and output data during 1990 2014 as samples the empirical results reveal that the paths for the contracting countries of paris agreement to improve the efficiency are different first lower middle income group can be facilitated through increasing factor input to increase the mml index considering the highest increase in scale efficiency 2 78 second low income group should eliminate the excessive concentration of inputs by enhancing the energy management efficiency third in terms of the significant advancement of high income group s mml index brought by technology advancement and the abnormal drop of brunei darussalam s mml related to technology decay this analysis emphasized that the advancement and innovation of energy technology are the main force for total factor co2 emission efficiency improvement

growth in china s grain production 1978 1997 a disaggregate analysis abstract this paper analyzes china s grain production during 1978 97 using disaggregate approach to explore disparities in growth patterns of respective crops the study reveals that during this period almost all the increased output can be attributed to the growth of rice wheat and corn the contribution of other crops as a whole was almost negligible the disparities in growth patterns were partly the result of crop adjustments induced by changes in food demand and dominated by substitutions of high yield crops for low yield crops in this process the adoption of new technologies played an important role varying opportunity costs of grain production in different areas also affected growth patterns of respective crops the trend in china s grain production in the past two decades suggests that the adherence to grain self sufficiency has become not only increasingly costly but also unnecessary

efficiency productivity gains and the size of brazilian supermarkets abstract the supermarket sector is an important segment of the brazilian economy in recent years the role of large retailers and market globalization has transformed this sector in one of the most competitive in the country this paper aims to evaluate the technical efficiency and scale of the brazilian supermarket sector through bootstrap data envelopment analysis and to measure changes in productivity from 2005 to 2012 applying the bootstrapped malmquist index a second stage analysis is performed to explain efficiency levels and productivity gains in terms of supermarket chains characteristics we found that the brazilian supermarket chains have low average efficiency levels and in general there was an increase in productivity in the period the consolidations that took place in this sector can be explained in terms of scales of operation small supermarket chains had lower efficiency levels both in 2005 and 2012 but experienced higher levels of productivity growth in the period results of second stage analysis shows that some supermarket chains characteristics are correlated to productivity gains

separability in farm household economics an experiment with linear programming abstract the assumption of separability between farm household production and consumption facilitates analysis but entails several important restrictions the implications of assuming separability are discussed here in relation to the modelling of a representative tongan farm household econometric estimation of household demand is coupled with a linear programming lp model of farm household production when analysing consumer demand separable farm household economics is undoubtedly preferable to ignoring the production consumption linkages entirely however the restrictions which must be imposed on the production side of the separable model are such that a realistic lp solution is unlikely to be obtained this is likely to be a major deterrent to adopting the separable approach for studies in which the main focus is on production rather than consumption

trends in china s regional grain production and their implications abstract the paper examines the growth of china s regional grain production during the reform period impacts of regional trends on china s interregional grain transfers and international trade are tackled it finds that there are significant variations between regions in terms of magnitudes and patterns of growth northern regions experienced a faster growth than southern regions there is a tendency to shift grain production centres towards north leading to a modification of crop composition in total national output a reversal of the prevailing direction of interregional transfers and a change in contents of grain flows the study argues that this shift is an inevitable result of the uneven progress of reforms and economic development and consequently the varying opportunity costs of grain production in different regions the analysis suggests that for china as a whole further growth of grain output has been impeded by the lack of new technologies and increasingly high opportunity costs of grain production in the northeast region where the potential for increasing maize output is relatively high production has been constrained by the shortage of transport and storage facilities as well as policy obstacles the study concludes that there is a necessity for china to decentralize its grain international trade in doing so the imports of grain in the south will increase and so will the exports of maize in the north

the post collective village a tale of two transitions summary this paper provides an ethnographic look at economic change in rural areas of remote regions of russia and china while the structural conditions of agriculture at the outset of reform partially explain the dramatically different trajectories of reform seen in my study sites the current state of economic stagnation or economic development in these areas should not primarily be seen as a legacy of pre reform conditions it is largely the economic policies pursued by the russian and chinese governments that have created or failed to create the conditions that enable post socialist farmers to take advantage of market opportunities

china s government finance and food security nexus a regime switching analysis this paper is an empirical assessment of the government finance and food security nexus in china from 1978 to 2016 using autoregressive distributed lag for linear and threshold cointegration the

economies of scale and mechanization in chinese corn and wheat production as the growth in chinese farm productivity slowed down between 2000 and 2010 modernizing agriculture has become a priority of the chinese government given the important role of mechanization and

deregulation intensity of competition industry evolution and the productivity growth of u s commercial banks we study the influence of the evolution in intrastate and interstate deregulations on the total factor productivity growth of u s commercial banking during 1971 95 we consider statewide deregulations in intrastate branching intrastate multibank holding company mbhc interstate multibank holding company and interstate mbhc de novo branching regulations results indicate that 1 long standing banking restrictions negatively affected banks productivity growth and 2 relaxing restrictions on intrastate branching expansion had a positive long run influence upon banks productivity growth the effect of interstate mbhc deregulations is largely short run and it is negative in the long run for interstate mbhc de novo branching deregulations

rural reforms and agricultural growth in china this paper employs province level panel data to assess the contributions of decollectivization price adjustments and other reforms to china s agricultural growth in the reform period decollectivization is found to improve total factor productivity and to account for about half of the output growth during 1978 84 the adjustment in state procurement prices also contributed positively to output growth its impact came mainly from the responses in input use the effect of other market related reforms on productivity and output growth was very small reasons for slowdown in agricultural growth after 1984 are also analyzed copyright 1992 by american economic association

non economic engagement and international exchange the case of environmental treaties we examine the role of non economic partnerships in promoting international economic exchange since far sighted countries are more willing to join costly international partnerships such as environmental treaties environmental engagement tends to encourage international lending countries with such non economic partnerships also find it easier to engage in economic exchanges since they face the possibility that debt default might also spill over to hinder their non economic relationships we present a theoretical model of these ideas and then verify their empirical importance using a bilateral cross section of data on international crossholdings of assets and environmental treaties our results support the notion that international environmental cooperation facilitates economic exchange

the changing structure of the world rice market 1950 2000 abstract the world rice market has been unstable for much of its post world war ii history with prices volatile and the availability of supplies uncertain these characteristics exemplified by the world food crisis of the mid 1970s influenced domestic price and production policies in a number of asian countries however the structure of the world rice market has evolved and changed during the past 50 years this paper identifies three distinct phases in the history of the market based on trends in the level and stability of production and the trade orientation of major exporters the level and stability of production increased steadily over the entire period exporters have generally been active in the world market with the period 1965 1981 being an important exception since the mid 1980s prices have been low and quite stable and the patterns identified in the paper suggest that prices will remain so in the future the policy implication is that asian rice importers can afford to rely more on the world market than was warranted in the past

technical change organizational form and the structure of bank production of those technological characteristics related to the nature of competition among firms in an industry or market scale economies and technical change are especially important economies of scale are said to exist when an equiproportional increase in all inputs results in a greater than proportional increase in output or equivalently when an increase in output at constant input prices leads to a less than proportional increase in total costs thus average costs decline as output expands depending upon the extent to which costs decline as output increases regulation of the firms in the industry may be necessary l the literature analyzing scale economies in commercial banking is voluminous the early studies on scale economies in banking include those by benston 1965 1972 greenbaum 1967 murphy 1972 and bell and murphy 1968 more recent studies include those by benston hanweck and humphrey 1982 and clark 1984 2 this literature has established that mild scale economies exist in bank

technical scale and allocative efficiencies in u s banking an empirical investigation a nonparametric frontier approach is used to calculate the overall technical pure technical allocative and scale efficiencies for a sample of 322 independent banks the sample was drawn from the federal deposit insurance corporation tapes on the reports of condition and reports of income call reports for the year 1986 the results indicated a low level of overall efficiency the main source of inefficiency was technical in nature rather than allocative separate efficiency frontiers were constructed to test the effect of branching however the distributions of efficiency measures for branching and non branching banks were not found to be different

exploring efficiency differences over time in the spanish banking industry abstract over the last 15 years the competitive conditions under which spanish banking firms operate have become much tighter deregulation has affected both banks and savings banks allowing them to expand geographically and to choose less regulation conditioned output mixes this paper analyzes how in these circumstances banking efficiency has been affected considering two specifications of output and analyzing the dynamics of the entire distribution not only mean and standard deviation results differ depending on the output definition but they show that in general efficiency scores exhibit dynamic patterns that only two moments of the distribution hardly capture in particular regardless of the output definition considered efficiency scores were more dispersed in 1985 and more concentrated in 1995 and there were substantial changes in firms efficiency relative positions as measured by transition probability matrices in addition the multi modality of the distributions has almost disappeared at the end of the period

economies of diversification in the banking industry abstract this paper defines a new measure economies of diversification to examine the cost effect of product line expansion this measure is a special case of expansion path subadditivity and contains economies of scope as a special case a nonparametric frontier technique which isolates the effects of inefficiency and scale is used to measure economies of diversification applied to a set of 468 u s depository institutions operating in 1984 we find slight diseconomies of diversification diseconomies of diversification and inefficiency due to the overutilization of resources are found to be more important determinants of bank costs than is the failure to operate at optimal scale

north south climate change negotiations a sequential game with asymmetric information this article determines the conditions under which thesouthern countries should act together or separately whilenegotiating with the north about climate change policy andabout the conditions for future southern engagement the papermodels the international negotiations with complete and withasymmetric information in a dynamic framework results showthat depending on their characteristics the differentplayers can obtain benefits delaying the moment of theagreement

food self sufficiency comparative advantage and agricultural trade a policy analysis matrix for chinese agriculture revised china s rapid economic growth and gradual transition toward a market economy have brought about significant changes in production and consumption patterns and trade behavior in agriculture in this study the authors assess the comparative advantage and protection of china s major agricultural crops using a modified policy analysis matrix ipami and data from 1996 to 1998 results strongly suggest that china has a comparative advantage in labor intensive crops and a disadvantage in land intensive crops

poverty population and environmental degradation in china this paper studies the relationship among population poverty and the environmental factors and the impact they have had on china s land water forests and pastures it does so by examining the extent of environmental degradation and china s success in controlling its environmental problems is reviewed by investigating how the leadership has tried to develop a legal framework and series of institutions to carry out environmental policy and by providing empirical evidence demonstrating the determinants of the successes that china has achieved in surmounting or slowing some of its environmental problems five of china s rural resource concerns are surveyed in this paper water pollution deforestation destruction of the grasslands soil erosion and salinization the paper finds that government policy has not been effective in controlling rural resource degradation primarily because it has limited fiscal resources and poorly trained personnel and under these constraints the government has delegated responsibility for environmental and resource protection to the ministries of agriculture and forestry two institutions that have an incentive to favor pro production policies instead china s efforts to alleviate policy integrate markets and control population appear to have helped mitigate a number of adverse environmental consequences of china s development effort of the last 40 years

a parallel production frontiers approach for intertemporal efficiency analysis the case of taiwanese commercial banks abstract a comparison of the efficiency of a production unit at one period with those of other units at another period is challenging because the bases for calculating efficiency are usually different the malmquist productivity index mpi is an effective measure that can overcome this difficulty however the existing measures of this index have various weaknesses with regard to feasibility circularity decomposability and consistency this paper thus develops a model to construct parallel production frontiers for the units at different periods to measure the mpi this model is always feasible the calculated mpi has the property of circularity it can be decomposed into the product of efficiency change and technical change and the results are consistent an application of this model to taiwanese commercial banks for the period 2008 2013 confirms these merits the results also indicate that in general the mpis of these banks increased from 2008 to 2013 and this was attributed to improvements in technology since the efficiencies measured from the parallel model are comparable among different units and different periods they can be used for intertemporal analysis to identify the banks with unsatisfactory performance in different periods

technology transfer with transboundary pollution a signalling approach there are increasing complaints from the developing world that developed countries seem reluctant to transfer green technology despite its benefits in helping to solve the climate problem identifying a signalling effect of technology transfer that was neglected by the previous literature this paper offers a rationale for this reluctance in a north south model with transboundary pollution in a benchmark case with complete information the north makes complete technology transfer leading to a pareto improvement however if the north s valuation on climate damage is its private information the north does not completely transfer the technology in almost all of the equilibria resume transfert de technologie quand il y a pollution transfrontiere une approche en termes de signaux il y a de plus en plus de plaintes dans le monde en developpement que les pays developpes sont reticents a transferer la technologie verte malgre les avantages que cela procurerait pour aider a resoudre les problemes lies aux changements climatiques identifiant cet effet de signalisation du transfert de technologie qui a ete neglige dans la litterature specialisee ce texte suggere des raisons pour expliquer cette reticence dans un modele nord sud avec pollution transfrontiere dans un cas de figure avec information complete le nord effectue un transfert complet de technologie menant a une amelioration a la pareto cependant si l evaluation du dommage cause par le climat est son information privee le nord ne transfere pas completement la technologie dans presque tous les equilibres

mergers and technical efficiency in spanish savings banks a stochastic distance function approach abstract the aim of this paper is to test the temporal variation of technical efficiency of spanish savings banks during the period 1985 1998 furthermore we test whether merged and non merged firms have different levels and temporal patterns of technical efficiency a stochastic output distance function r w shephard theory of cost and production functions princeton university press princeton nj is employed to accommodate multiple output technology the distance function provides the advantage that it does not need information about prices so it can accommodate the multi product nature of the financial sector only using the quantities as data an important point when the assumptions about perfectly competitive markets are unlikely to be met the temporal variation of efficiency is modeled extending the battese and coelli journal of productivity analysis 3 1992 153 169 approach in two ways relaxing the monotonicity of the temporal variation pattern of the efficiency term and allowing for different patterns of efficiency change between merged and non merged firms

liberalization endogenous institutions and growth a comparative analysis of agricultural reforms in africa asia and europe thirty years ago a vast share of low and middle income countries was heavily state controlled the liberalizations of the 1980s and 1990s had greatly different effects on growth in countries in africa asia and europe a comparative framework is used to document these differences and a model is developed to formally analyze how liberalization affects production and income distribution when the institutions that govern production and exchange are also affected hypotheses are derived for how endogenous institutional adjustments affect the growth response to liberalization these insights motivate a series of explanations for the differences in performance across regions and commodities following liberalization

success and failure of reform insights from the transition of agriculture this paper analyzes the linkages between the reform strategies in transition countries and economic performance the authors focus on agriculture because of the sharpness of the policy changes fundamental differences among countries and relative simplicity of agricultural relationships the authors document post reform performance in the transition countries of asia and europe the authors show how a pricing reform and subsidy reductions b land rights reform and policies that affect farm restructuring and c the presence institutions that facilitate exchange either markets or market substitutes affect output and productivity the paper ends with general lessons on reforms and transition

effects of technological change and institutional reform on production growth in chinese agriculture recent rapid agricultural production growth in chinese agriculture could be attributed to an increase in inputs technological change and institutional reform an accounting approach was used to separate the relative contribution of these three factors institutional change like the introduction of the household production responsibility system has contributed to past growth in production however technological change is crucial to furthering production growth because of the limited potential for significant increase in the use of conventional inputs in particular land continued institutional change must accompany corresponding technological changes

exploring the nexus between banking sector reform and performance evidence from newly acceded eu countries abstract the aim of this study is to examine the relationship between banking sector reform and bank performance measured in terms of efficiency total factor productivity growth and net interest margin accounting for the effects through competition and bank risk taking to this end we develop an empirical model of bank performance which is consistently estimated using recent econometric techniques the model is applied to bank panel data from ten newly acceded eu countries the results indicate that both banking sector reform and competition exert a positive impact on bank efficiency while the effect of reform on total factor productivity growth is significant only toward the end of the reform process finally the effect of capital and credit risk on bank performance is in most cases negative while it seems that higher liquid assets reduce the efficiency and productivity of banks

china s agriculture drivers of change and implications for china and the rest of world the overall goal of this article is to identify major changes in china s agriculture food economy and their implications for both china itself and more importantly to the rest of world china has become one of the fastest growing economies in the world since late 1970s gdp grew at about 10 annually in the past 30 years china s experience shows the importance of both domestic and external policies in achieving sustainable growth the results from this study provide significant policy implications to many countries that are currently china s major trade partners or those seeking greater economic and trade relations with china the main conclusions on the implications of china s rapid economic growth are that china s growth will provide more opportunities than challenges to the rest of the world on average overall the rest of the world will gain from china s economic expansion though this general conclusion may not hold for some countries

technical progress inefficiency and productivity change in u s banking 1984 1993 studies often find that on average u s commercial banks are quite inefficient and the authors find that banks became more technically inefficient between 1984 and 1993 from a new decomposition of the malmquist productivity index into changes in pure technical and scale efficiency as well as both pure technical changes and changes in scale of technology they find that much of the inefficiency increase can be attributed to the general failure of banks to adopt technological improvements made by a few banks that advanced the efficient frontier small banks experienced especially large decreases in both efficiency and productivity

public investment and china s long term food security under wto abstract as the world s most populous nation china has taken various measures to increase grain production output in the past several decades however many of the policy interventions to promote grain production are not in conformity with wto rules and also lead to misallocation of resources and loss of production efficiency while adequately steady growth of grain output may still be a policy goal for the world s most populous nation with continuous population growth and economic development it is crucial that the country moves away from many of its past measures and explores alternative policy tools to strengthen domestic grain production by using agricultural research and irrigation as a proxy this paper examines the effects of public investment in irrigation and agricultural research on the output increase of grain production in china in a crop specific manner the research finds that increasing public investment in agricultural research will bring about higher output in a cost effective manner increasing public investment in agricultural r d etc should be considered with high priority in the future to be utilized as a policy tool to enhance long term food security

hybrid rice innovation in china a study of market demand induced technological innovation in a centrally planned economy this paper uses the innovation of hybrid rice in china as a case study to test the validity of the griliches schmookler hypothesis of market demand induced technological innovation in a centrally planned economy the empirical evidence indicates that the size of rice acreage in a province is the major factor in determining the amount of resource allocation for rice research and the adoption intensity of hybrid rice in that province this evidence is consistent with the implication of the griliches schmookler hypothesis copyright 1992 by mit press

economies of scale and scope and the economic efficiency of china s agricultural research system this article investigates economies of scale and scope and other potential sources of improvements in the economic efficiency of china s crop breeding an industry at the heart of the nation s food economy using data covering 46 wheatand maize breeding institutes from 1981 to 2000 we estimate cost functions for the production of new varieties at china s wheat and maize breeding institutes our results indicate strong economies of scale along with small to moderate economies of scope related to the joint production of new wheat and maize varieties cost efficiency increases significantly with increases in the breeders educational status and with increases in access to genetic materials from outside the institute

pesticide productivity host plant resistance and productivity in china abstract pesticides are used as the primary method of pest control in asian rice production conditions in china have led to demand for high and increasing rice yields resulting in intensive cultivation and adoption of fertilizer responsive varieties the consequence has been widespread pest infestations many studies have estimated pesticide productivity but few have estimated the productivity of alternative methods of pest control namely host plant resistance none have estimated the substitutability between these methods of pest control the productivity of pesticides and host plant resistance and the substitutability between them is measured using two stage cobb douglas and translog production functions under intensive rice production systems in eastern china pesticide productivity is low compared to the productivity of host plant resistance in fact returns to pesticide use are negative at the margin host plant resistance is an effective substitute for pesticides and substantial reductions in pesticide use could be achieved with no loss in rice production through improvements in host plant resistance these results suggest that pesticides are being overused in eastern china and host plant resistance is being under utilized government policies to promote increased pesticides in rice might be ill advised given the low productivity and negative returns particularly in light of well known negative externalities associated with pesticide use

north south negotiations on emission reductions a bargaining approach this article models north south negotiations on emission reductions where the north provides side payments in exchange for the south s adoption of a more stringent emission standard we find that depending on where firms compete strong asymmetry among regions the two regions different valuations of side payments and climate change damage can produce self enforcing cooperative agreements moreover the south s optimal standard choice can be one of two polar cases i e either the cleanest or the dirtiest irrespective of the continuum of standards available the results above can also hold true when both parties bargain over the south s emission tax

the incentives for north south transfer of climate mitigation technologies with trade in polluting goods the need to transfer climate mitigation technologies towards the developing world has been acknowledged since the beginning of climate negotiations little progress has however been made as shown by article 10 of the paris agreement one reason is that these technologies could become vital assets to compete on global markets this paper presents a partial equilibrium model with two regions the north and the south and imperfect competition in the international polluting goods market to analyze the north s incentives to accept technology transfer results crucially depend on the existence of environmental cooperation when both northern and southern governments set emission quotas non cooperatively inducing fewer global emissions is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the north to accept the transfer in contrast when governments set quotas cooperatively the north has no incentive to share its technology either before or after the agreement technology transfer commitments may be included in the agreement but with no effect on global emissions and global surplus the only impacts are distributional technology transfers and side payments may be substitute instruments

control in a dynamic village economy the reforms and unbalanced development in china s rural economy abstract a dynamic control framework is used to model the chinese village economy in order to explain the rural sector s unbalanced growth in the post reform period village leaders are assumed to maximize a multi attribute utility function by manipulating local policy instruments subject to the structural relationships in the economy the model s parameters are estimated econometrically using a data set from forty villages in eastern china the empirical results identify important linkages between agriculture and rural industry in village economies unbalanced growth can partially be explained by the way economic incentives induce individuals in rural areas to move resources toward the rural industrial sector and away from agriculture

bridging the gap between partial and total factor productivity measures using directional distance functions technical dependencies as well as data constraints limit our ability to allocate inputs across sectors and hence our ability to measure sectoral productivity we adapt a directional measure of efficiency to the measurement of sector specific productivity that does not require allocating all inputs across sectors applied to the agricultural sector of a group of countries the results show important differences in livestock and crops productivity growth commonly used partial factor productivity measures for livestock and crops tend to overestimate productivity growth in most developing countries while underestimating it in european countries

education and allocative efficiency household income growth during rural reforms in china this paper studies the contribution of schooling to rural income in china during factor market liberalization between 1986 and 1995 the relaxation of controls permitted farm households to reallocate productive inputs from agriculture to nonagricultural activities it is hypothesized that education facilitates this adjustment panel data from sichuan province suggest that schooling enhanced the ability of farmers to devote labor and capital to nonfarm production given the evidence that less than optimum levels of these inputs were allocated to nonagricultural uses during the transition the expansion of nonfarm activities contributed significantly to household income growth

public security in brazil efficiency and technological gaps abstract this article analyzes the technical efficiency the total factor productivity tfp and the technological gap in public security services in brazilian states the order m frontier is used for results estimation the tfp variation is built by decomposing the malmquist productivity index into technical efficiency scale efficiency and technological variation more than 50 of the federative units were considered technically inefficient out of the 27 federative units 12 presented a positive total productivity while all others suffered total productivity losses productivity gains in public security are more related to scale aspects than to efficiency improvements and technological progress

the effect of technological imitation on corporate innovation evidence from us patent data abstract technological imitation may play a crucial role in motivating firms to innovate however theoretical predictions and empirical findings on the role of imitation have not yet reached a consensus one major gap in the previous studies is that the empirical tests are based on samples consisting of only one industry over a short period of time this study uses a novel measure of industry level technological imitation proxied by quick citations by competitors to examine the relationship between imitation and innovation using us patent data for the period 1977 2005 we find that there are inverted u shaped relationships between the degree of industry level technological imitation and industry level innovation activities and between the degree of industry level technological imitation and the value of firm level innovation our results suggest that positive externalities from the interactions among firms during the innovation process outweigh the negative effects of free riding concerns on firms innovation activities and incentives to innovate up to a high degree of technological imitation while free riding concerns outweigh the positive externalities when the level of technological imitation is extremely high the sector by sector analyses show that the relationship between technological imitation and the quantity and market value of innovation are not very different across pavitt sectors a comparative analysis on the role of imitation between agglomerated and non agglomerated industries suggests that the positive effect of a moderate level of imitation and the negative effect of an excessive level of imitation are more pronounced for agglomerated industries the results suggest that creating innovation clusters such as silicon valley in the united states and shenzhen city in china and allowing different innovators to cooperate imitate and compete with each other would be very effective in promoting corporate innovation however an excessively high level of technological imitation is more detrimental for firms in innovation clusters because it lowers those firms incentives to innovate more radically

rising wages mechanization and the substitution between capital and labor evidence from small scale farm system in china this article aims to investigate major factors that led to the observed pace of mechanization and the substitution between labor and machines in rural china we used commodity wise province level panel data for more than a quarter of a century from 1984 to 2012 the analysis demonstrated a dramatic increase in real agricultural wages in recent years especially after 2003 in contrast to a relatively stable real machine price the relative price of machines against agricultural labor has declined in an accelerating way which contributed to the observed rapid introduction of machines the elasticity of substitution between labor and machines was large in some commodities which contributed to a fast substitution of labor by machines

toward a food secure future ensuring food security for sustainable human development in sub saharan africa food security remains a top development priority and global concern it is enshrined in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development in sustainable development goal two food security is also a core component of the human development and capability paradigm since food access and entitlements are critical for reinforcing essential human capabilities in introducing this special issue this paper argues that agriculture is central to improving food security and reducing poverty in africa it suggests that realizing the potential of agriculture in africa requires rapid increases in land productivity and increases in agricultural yields a science based approach that integrates gender and sustainability is critical to meet this goal through the design and implementation of policies that improve the availability farm inputs and farm technology the paper concludes by introducing the papers in this special issue

incomplete information and incentives to free ride on international environmental resources abstract this paper studies free riding incentives on common environmental resources in an incomplete information repeated game where abatements are perishable and perfect substitutes two contrasting types of perfect bayesian equilibria emerge for high discount factors or low discount factors but pessimistic prior beliefs the inclusion of incomplete information has no impact on the pattern of abatements otherwise the countries attempt to use their private information strategically and the game becomes a war of attrition this generates an outcome where the pessimistic country unilaterally abates forever and another which involves delay until the first abatement if both countries are optimistic

livestock in china commodity specific total factor productivity decomposition using new panel data studies of total factor productivity tfp in livestock production are rare but when available provide useful information especially in the context of developing countries such as china where livestock is becoming more important in the domestic agricultural economy we estimate tfp for four major livestock products in china employing the stochastic frontier approach and decompose productivity growth into its technical efficiency te and technical progress components efforts are made to adjust and augment the available livestock statistics the results show that growth in tfp and its components varied between the 1980s and the 1990s as well as over production structures while there is evidence of considerable technical innovation in china s livestock sector te improvement has been relatively slow