smallholder market participation concepts and evidence from eastern and southern africa abstract this paper reviews the evidence on smallholder market participation with a focus on staple foodgrains i e cereals in eastern and southern africa in an effort to help better identify what interventions are most likely to break smallholders out of the semi subsistence poverty trap that appears to ensnare much of rural africa the conceptual and empirical evidence suggests that interventions aimed at facilitating smallholder organization at reducing the costs of intermarket commerce and perhaps especially at improving poorer households access to improved technologies and productive assets are central to stimulating smallholder market participation and escape from semi subsistence poverty traps macroeconomic and trade policy tools appear less useful in inducing market participation by poor smallholders in the region

tradeoffs or synergies assessing local and regional food aid procurement through case studies in burkina faso and guatemala we compare the impacts across a range of criteria of local and regional procurement lrp relative to transoceanic shipment of food aid in burkina faso and guatemala we find that neither instrument dominates the other across all criteria in either country although lrp commonly performs at least as well as transoceanic shipment with respect to timeliness cost market price impacts satisfying recipients preferences food quality and safety and in benefiting smallholder suppliers lrp is plainly a valuable food assistance tool but its advantages and disadvantages must be carefully weighed compared and prioritized depending on the context and program objectives

a joint investigation of public support and public values case of instream flows in new mexico abstract instream flow can be defined as the flow of water in its natural channels without diversion alone among the western us states new mexico nm fails to provide any mechanism for the protection of instream flows and has a long history of political resistance to any change in the status quo using the combined results from two statewide telephone surveys this study jointly investigates stated voting preferences for a proposed institutional change and stated valuation preferences for minimum instream flow protection the contingent valuation cv question uses a dichotomous choice dc elicitation format and a voluntary contribution trust fund payment vehicle results show a highly significant positive correlation between expressed voting preferences and expressed valuation preferences additionally those individuals who respond yes to the voting question have an expected willingness to pay wtp of 80 with a 95 confidence interval ci that is always positive 62 97 while those who respond no to the voting question have an expected wtp that is actually slightly negative 6 with a 95 ci containing zero 14 2 taken together these results provide evidence of construct validity estimation results are also shown to be temporally reliable across repeated samples thus there is strong evidence of public support for instream flow protection and its associated nonmarket benefits such evidence helps to provide instream flow concerns with standing in future nm water policy debates prominent examples include explicitly defining beneficial use and public welfare to allow consideration of instream flow protection

the dual structure of incomplete demand systems integrability of incomplete demand systems is discussed the concepts of weak integrability quasi expenditure function quasi indirect utility function and quasi utility function are defined their relationships to the expenditure function indirect utility function and utility function are developed the dual structure of the quasi functions permits exact welfare analysis and reveals the conditional preference structure for the commodities of interest new results relating the uniqueness and exactness of consumer s surplus to the structure of the expenditure and indirect utility functions are obtained

a utility consistent combined discrete choice and count data model assessing recreational use losses due to natural resource damage abstract a two stage budgeting approach can often be taken when analyzing consumer choice situations in this paper we examine the particular situation where a consumer makes purchases of a discrete commodity of which there are a number of brands in the first stage the consumer decides how many purchases to make in the second stage the consumer decides how to allocate these purchases across brands our econometric approach to this type of situation uses a utility consistent combined discrete choice and count data model the second stage which is specified as a multinomial choice model produces a price index for the commodity which is used to estimate the first stage which is specified as a count data model we apply the model to recreational demand behavior in alaska in order to estimate the welfare losses suffered by recreational users due to the exxon valdez oil spill these results may provide useful input to government agencies attempting to estimate the appropriate level of taxes fines or regulations for deterring damage to the environment

price principle and the environment should preferences count as a normative discipline welfare and therefore resource economics postulates that preferences should count in the allocation of resources this postulate cannot be justified in relation to choice or to well being the nor mative qualities that attend choices e g ac countability responsibility commitment and consent explain why choices should count but not preferences which are not actions but theo retical entities constructed ad hoc from stipu lated descriptions of behavior they are then said to explain the satisfaction of preferences moreover has no demonstrable relation with any conception of welfare or well being not sim ply defined in terms of it jel a13

small farmers and big retail trade offs of supplying supermarkets in nicaragua summary in nicaragua and elsewhere in central america small scale farmers are weighing the risks of entering into contracts with supermarket chains we use unique data from cooperatives supplying supermarkets to study the effect of supply agreements on producers mean output prices and price stability we find that prices paid by the domestic retail chain approximate the traditional market in mean and variance while mean prices paid by walmart are significantly lower than the traditional market however the walmart contract is found to systematically reduce price volatility we find some evidence however that farmers may be paying too much for this contractual insurance against price variation

a two constraint almost ideal demand model of recreation and donations an incomplete demand system is developed for recreation and donation choices subject to both money and time constraints the model results in a three good system with an endogenous marginal value of time for estimation the model is implemented by adapting deaton and muellbauer s locally flexible almost ideal demand system to a two constraint recreation model of trips and donations of california whale watchers exact welfare measures are calculated for changes in costs as well as for whale population changes results indicate a use and a nonuse component of overall willingness to pay for increases in environmental quality

a complex systems approach to the value of ecological resources a theory of value sits at the core of every school of economic thought and directs the allocation of resources to competing uses ecological resources complicate the modem neoclassical approach to determining value due to their complex nature considerable non market values and the difficulty in assigning property rights application of the market model through economic valuation only provides analytical solutions based on virtual markets and neither the demand nor supply side techniques of valuation can adequately consider the complex set of biophysical and ecological relations that lead to the provision of ecosystem goods and services this paper sets out a conceptual framework for a complex systems approach to the value of ecological resources this approach is based on there being both an intrinsic quality of ecological resources and a subjective evaluation by the consumer both elements are necessary for economic value this conceptual framework points the way towards a theory of value that incorporates both elements so has implications for principles by which ecological resources can be allocated c 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the opportunity cost of travel time in recreation demand models deciding how to allocate forage among animals is a fundamentally important process in range management the wisdom of these decisions can be enhanced by estimating the marginal value of forage needed by competing species we present a method for

the relevance of attitudinal factors for the acceptance of energy policy measures a micro econometric analysis abstract this paper empirically examines the individual support of the german energy transition in total and especially of six single energy policy measures which are components of the energy transition our micro econometric analysis with binary and ordered probit models on the basis of data from a broad survey of citizens reveals the important role of several attitudinal factors with respect to our indicators for perceived personal costs of the energy transition the estimation results point to a weak evidence for economic self interest due to some negative correlations between expected energy price increases due to the energy transition and the support of single energy policy measures interestingly however the concern that the energy transition alone causes strong energy price increases is not shared by the majority of the respondents the estimation results also suggest that the support of several energy policy measures is strongly correlated with environmental values however the most important attitudinal factor is obviously political identification the econometric analysis suggests that an overall left green policy identification is positively correlated with the support of the energy transition in total and an identification with ecological policy is positively correlated with the acceptance of several single energy policy measures the econometric analysis especially supports the more sophisticated categorization of political orientation since for example a liberal conservative policy orientation is not significantly correlated with the support of the energy transition in total

contract farming and smallholder outgrower schemes in less developed countries abstract some studies of outgrower schemes involving smallholders and public or private corporations in less developed countries suggest the potential value of such arrangements in facilitating transfer of technology access to markets and other benefits for growers a diverse literature is surveyed to see what economic and political questions have been raised which have a bearing on the issue of grower welfare in some cases existing literature or the author s own research provides adequate answers to the questions raised in others the need for further research is indicated some possible directions and methodologies for systematic comparative studies are suggested

cash crop production food price volatility and rural market integration in the third world large farmers in the third world often devote to cash crops a larger share of their land than do small farmers this paper suggests a possible explanation even in the presence of food markets third world farmers food security is best assured by food self sufficiency a model of crop portfolio choice under multivariate risk is used to show that reasonable assumptions regarding risk and preferences reproduce the observed pattern simulations further indicate that food market integration reduces the need for food self sufficiency policy implications are drawn regarding domestic trade liberalization and agricultural technology

contract farming configuration smallholders preferences for contract design attributes while contract farming cf can enhance smallholders income in developing countries empirical research on the motivation of smallholders to participate in cf is scarce this paper explores farmer preferences for particular contract design attributes we combined analytical hierarchy process and discrete choice experiments to investigate the importance of contract design attributes on the basis of data collected among potato farmers in ethiopia we found that input market uncertainty is more important than output market uncertainty in smallholders decision to participate farmers tend to minimize their risk by opting for the buyer firm above the state and ngos as providers of seed inputs and technical assistance the results imply that the success of a cf scheme depends on the willingness of the firm to incorporate the preferred contract design attributes institutional intervention in the input market could induce agribusiness firms to offer attractive contracts for smallholders

the demand for leisure time in the presence of constrained work hours w douglass shaw this article presents a labor supply model designed to address situations of overemployment or underemployment in the labor market previous labor supply models have taken the possibility of work hour constraints into consideration but typically assumed that the existence of fixed work hours only influenced the decision of labor force participation this ignores situations in which individuals choose to be employed at fixed hour jobs even though these jobs do not offer the desired work hours jel j22 i introduction early attempts to incorporate time into consumer theory such as those by becker 1965 and by deserpa 1971 and to explain behavior in labor markets such as heckman s 1974 pioneering study relied on the assumption that individuals are able to freely adjust the hours they work the ability of an individual to achieve equilibrium in these models depends on flexible work hours for many individuals however hours of work are likely to be constrained individuals wishing to increase or decrease their work time may face a decision of either accepting the fixed hour schedule or exiting the labor force more refined models of labor force participation put forth by moffitt 1982 tummers and woittiez 1990 and zabel 1993 recognized this by incorporating a fixed hour constraint directly into the labor force participation decision generally these models assume that individuals decide whether or not to accept employment by comparing offered hours with desired hours if desired hours exceed offered hours then the individual enters the labor force models with a fixed hour constraint represent an improvement but they ignore the possibility that a large proportion of the labor force is likely to be either underemployed or overemployed due to the ubiquity of fixed hour employment the presence of these types of jobs is well documented in the literature schor 1991 lists several reasons including lack of lower skilled jobs costly fringe benefits and increased business competition why underemployment and overemployment is prevalent in the u s workplace prior studies by mossin and bronfenbrenner 1967 and by altonji and paxson 1988 document underemployment in the workplace in a study of the u s work force ham 1982 found that unemployed and underemployed workers ranged from 19 2 in 1973 to 28 2 in 1970 1 on the overemployment side tarling 1987 claims that recent evidence indicates that many employees would be prepared to forgo some of their earnings in order to reduce their hours of work p 85 bockstael et al 1987 make a simi lar observation noting that in their sample individuals with fixed working hours appear to value time much more highly than the wage rate and would be willing to trade work for leisure p 301 hahnel 1998 concluded that results from a 1994 survey suggest that u s workers have a slight preference for pay cuts in order to reduce their work hours about 50 of the respondents claimed they would accept a 10 reduction in pay in order to work a four day week well over half of the respondents in the survey claimed that it was either fairly difficult or almost impossible to reduce their work hours and over 60 reported that reducing their work hours would have a negative impact on their careers although the existence of underemployment and overemployment is well documented explicitly accounting for it in labor supply models remains largely unexplored in the literature in this paper the labor supply model originally analyzed by heckman 1974 is extended to recognize and incorporate fixed hour situations heckman s model which has been described as the most prevalent in the literature by zabel 1993 is derived by comparing reservation and market wages in its original form it posited a strong link between the labor force participation decision and the labor supply decision

the opportunity cost of travel time as a noisy wage fraction few issues are more important to welfare estimation with recreation demand models than the specification of the opportunity cost of travel time the two most common approaches to specifying this cost treat it as a fixed fraction of the recreationist s wage and either estimate the fraction done infrequently or assume it takes some value done commonly with references to results from the commute time literature used to justify the latter however these approaches lack firm conceptual rationales and the consequences of using them are not fully understood recognizing that information limitations often preclude more general approaches we use a joint recreation travel labor supply model to show that under relatively modest assumptions the opportunity cost of travel time can be expressed as a wage fraction with noise this formulation is straightforward to implement as part of random parameters based recreation demand models we then evaluate the welfare consequences of using the two approaches noted above which are special cases of the noisy wage fraction specification our results suggest that the more critical restriction to relax in opportunity cost of travel time specifications is the absence of noise rather than the specific level of the wage fraction

willingness to pay for snowmobile recreation travel cost method models with and without post season resurvey of trip count annual willingness to pay wtp for snowmobile recreation in idaho is estimated using the travel cost method tcm on site snow conditions are important and erratic thus we collect two measures o

finding default understanding the drivers of default on contracts with farmers organizations under the world food programme purchase for progress pilot during the past two decades food assistance policy has shifted toward local or regional food purchases and away from purchases from donor countries while most local and regional procurement occurs through hard tendering processes open to large scale firms and farms there is growing interest in identifying how and whether to procure from smallholder farmer organizations to date little is known about the drivers of successful contracting with farmers organizations fos we utilize data from the united nations world food programme purchase for progress pilot in three east african countries to predict defaults on contracts we examine four possible explanations country contexts fo characteristics prior experience with contracts and contract modalities and their relationship to local spot market prices the single most important predictor of default is the increase in market prices between contract approval and delivery yet while increases in market prices are linked to increases in default this relationship is decreasing in contract size indicating search costs associated with breaking contracts our findings yield both generalizable and context specific insights about whether and when procuring from smallholder farmers can be successfully integrated into the food assistance toolkit this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

on the choice and impacts of innovative international food assistance instruments summary the rise of new food assistance instruments including local and regional procurement cash and vouchers has surpassed increase in understanding of the tradeoffs among and impacts of these options relative to traditional food aid response choices rarely appear to result from systematic response analyses further impacts along multiple dimensions timeliness cost effectiveness local market effects recipient satisfaction food quality impact on smallholder suppliers etc may be competing or synergistic no single food assistance tool is always and everywhere preferable a growing body of evidence including the papers in this special section nonetheless demonstrates the clear value added of new food assistance instruments

choices without prices without apologies valuing is usually regarded as a process of compressing information about attributes into a single metric armed with this reduced form of compact information the consumer can consider a particular object with a particular price attached or implied and make an informed decision but the process of valuing is less straightforward than we ordinarily suppose when environmental goods and services become the object of information compaction it is possible that important information is lost we comment on the choice problem germane to environmental goods and services and challenge the presumption that environmental choices made without explicit pricing are inferior to those in which hypothetical valuation studies are undertaken

recreation demand choices and revealed values of leisure time i introduction at least since the work of becker 1965 it has been recognized widely that time may play an important role in consumer demand one of the areas where this may be most significant empirically is in the valuation of natural resource amenities through their associated recreation demands a principal reason is that recreation is a time intensive commodity so that the value of the time spent in recreation would be expected to play a large role in its overall value the potential bias to consumer s surplus estimates of the net economic value of recreation from excluding time prices from the demand model has been recognized from the outset for example by knetsch 1963 and clawson 1959 to incorporate time into recreation demand models researchers have generally adopted the practice suggested by mcconnell 1975 of defining the full price of recreation as the money cost of a trip plus its monetized time cost though the use of full budgets also called for by the becker approach is less widespread bockstael et al 1987 pointed out quite clearly that both full budgets and full prices are required in the demand function if the recreationist is jointly choosing labor supply with recreation at an exogenous marginal wage but that the structure of demand was unclear if the individual was not making such marginal labor supply choices i e if he or she was working fixed hours subsequently larson and shaikh 2001 showed that the full prices full budgets specification is sufficient to satisfy the constraints on demand parameters that arise because choice is made subject to two binding constraints regardless of the individual s position in the labor market they also pointed out that models that use full prices but only money income in effect ignoring the role of time as a resource constraint cannot be consistent with the requirements of choice subject to two constraints although the outlines of how time should enter the structure of demand are becoming clear a major unresolved issue is how to determine its value in practice several studies have followed the basic logic of becker s early work assuming that the opportunity cost of recreation time i e the value of other time forgone in favor of recreation is an exogenous parameter such as the average wage rate or more commonly some fraction thereof this fraction is either chosen arbitrarily or estimated as part of the recreation demand model as in cesario 1976 mcconnell and strand 1981 and smith et al 1983 such assumptions may be erroneous for a variety of reasons assuming the average wage is the appropriate opportunity cost of time presumes that the individual faces no constraints on hours worked derives no utility or disutility from work and has a linear wage function as has been noted by chiswick 1967 bockstael et al 1987 and smith et al 1983 this is unlikely to be true for many people assuming some constant fraction of the wage is the opportunity cost of time especially an arbitrarily chosen fraction also seems likely to be incorrect for most people for all of these reasons an individual s average wage does not necessarily reveal anything about the shadow value of discretionary leisure time either as an upper or lower bound in a recent advance feather and shaw 2000 adapted the heckman 1974 labor supply model to include information supplied by recreationists about their labor supply status in particular whether they felt under or over employed relative to their desired number of hours this information is used to identify subgroups in the data for which the shadow value of leisure time is less than the wage or more than the wage which helps in the estimation of both a wage function and a shadow value of leisure time function this approach produces individual specific estimates of the opportunity cost of leisure time based on their demographics and labor market decisions which are used in a subsequent recreation demand analysis

principal challenges confronting smallholder agriculture in sub saharan africa summary this paper uses small scale farm survey data from five countries of eastern and southern africa to highlight four under appreciated issues i how land distribution patterns constrain the potential of crop technology and input intensification to enable many small farms to escape from poverty ii why most smallholders are unable to produce more than a marginal surplus or participate meaningfully in commodity markets iii why most farmers are directly hurt by higher grain prices and iv why the marketed agricultural surplus is exceedingly concentrated among a small group of relatively large smallholders policy and public investment options are reviewed in the light of these findings there is no one future for small farms in africa much depends on government policy and investment decisions

small farmers ngos and a walmart world welfare effects of supermarkets operating in nicaragua despite more than a decade of ngo and government activities promoting developing world farmer participation in high value agricultural markets evidence regarding the household welfare effects of such initiatives is limited this paper analyzes the geographic placement of supermarket supply chains in nicaragua between 2000 and 2008 and uses a difference in difference specification on measures of supplier and non supplier assets to estimate the welfare effects of small farmer participation though results indicate that selling to supermarkets increases household productive asset holdings they also suggest that only farmers with advantageous endowments of geography and water are likely to participate

efficiency equity tradeoffs in targeting payments for ecosystem services this article develops an analytic framework to analyze the tradeoff between economic efficiency and distributional equity in targeting payments for ecosystem services pes it also proposes an empirical procedure to trace out the efficiency equity frontier where the program is pareto optimal in the sense that it cannot be improved upon to achieve either higher efficiency or distributional equity without compromising the other we apply the procedure to the conservation reserve program crp the largest pes program in u s history to analyze a whether it is possible to improve both the efficiency and the distributional equity of the program and b what the choice made by crp administrators implies about the political economic balance results reveal that a crp administrators forfeited about 9 of efficiency for an 18 23 improvement in distributional equity depending on the equity indicator used in the eighteenth signup of the crp b reducing the maximum allowable rental rate for all contracts would improve efficiency at the cost of distributional equity c reducing the maximum county enrollment cap would reduce efficiency without generating much improvement in distributional equity and d the crp targeting criterion could be redesigned to achieve both higher efficiency and higher distributional equity

time and the recreational demand model in this paper a theoretically consistent approach to including time costs in recreational demand models is developed the demand model is conditional on the recreationist s labor market situation for individuals at corner solutions in the labor market utility maximization is subject to two constraints leading to a demand function with travel costs and travel time as independent variables with interior solutions in the labor market time is valued at the wage rate and combined with travel costs to produce one full cost variable in an illustration welfare measures based on the new model are estimated for a sample of sportfishermen

accounting for stochastic shadow values of time in discrete choice recreation demand models abstract in this paper a discrete choice recreation demand model that explicitly accounts for a stochastic shadow value of time function is proposed using data from a survey of san diego beach users the stochastic shadow value of time labor supply and beach choice are jointly estimated results from this joint estimation approach are compared with the familiar two step approach that estimates labor supply first and uses predicted values of time in the recreational site choice model the approaches produce markedly different welfare measures with the two step model which does not account for unobserved variability of time values predicting significantly higher values a monte carlo simulation illustrates how ignoring the stochastic nature of shadow value of time in discrete choice recreation demand models can bias model parameters and hence welfare estimates

profits from participation in high value agriculture evidence of heterogeneous benefits in contract farming schemes in southern india abstract this paper assesses the variable impact of participation in high value agriculture through contract farming arrangements in southern india using survey data for 474 farmers in four commodity sectors gherkins papaya marigold and broiler an endogenous switching model is used to estimate net profits from participation findings suggest that average treatments effect vary widely across contract commodities papaya and broiler contracting offer clear net gains for participants whereas marigold contracting leaves participants worse off for gherkins while contracting holds net gains for participating farmers overall this is true of contracts with some firms but not others the standard deviations of point estimates of treatment effects are quite large indicating variability in profit gains even within the same commodity sectors thus notwithstanding the sign of average treatment effects contract farming arrangements have diverse impacts on income for individual farmers and these could have implications for sustained participation of farmers in high value agriculture

increasing the benefits to smallholders from contract farming problems for farmers organizations and policy makers abstract contract farming cf is potentially beneficial to small farmers providing services not readily available by other means in reality growers frequently face serious problems in dealing with firms indicating the need for intervention by government or by farmers organizations however the hybrid structure and multiple objectives of cf schemes make it difficult to organize farmers or to design effective policy interventions this article describes some of the most frequent problems points out trade offs among competing welfare goals and cautions against the use of cf as a simple model for agricultural development

why do small scale producers choose to produce under contract lessons from nontraditional vegetable exports from zimbabwe summary this article explores the motivations behind the decision of small scale producers to grow nontraditional vegetables under contract for export based on a survey of small scale producers in zimbabwe four factors are identified as motivating contracting namely market uncertainty indirect benefits e g knowledge acquisition income benefits and intangible benefits respondents are clustered according to the relative importance of these factors in their contracting decision four clusters are identified and related to the characteristics of these farmers including size of the farm amount of land devoted to export crops access to alternative markets and the proportion of family income derived from export crops the results suggest that there are systematic differences between farmers in their decisions to contract which needs to be recognized in contract design and management 2005 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

aggregation and deliberation in valuing environmental public goods starting from a distinction between kantian principle based and utilitarian preference based approaches in political theory this essay argues that we may understand normative judgments individuals make about policy to express principled views of the public interest or purpose not private preferences about their own consumption opportunities these judgments in other words state opinions about what we ought to do as a society rather than report preferences about what i want as a utility maximizer this essay then argues that contingent valuation can take into account these kinds of judgments which dominate public discourse about the environment only if it moves toward a deliberative discursive jury like research method emphasizing informed discussion leading toward a consensus based on an argument about the public interest

on self interested preferences for burden sharing rules an econometric analysis for the costs of energy policy measures abstract this paper examines the acceptance of burden sharing rules that refer to the costs of the german energy transition which is one of the most challenging and disputed national climate and energy policy measures based on data from a comprehensive survey of more than 2200 citizens the empirical analysis reveals that the polluter pays rule has by far the highest support compared with the ability to pay rule and especially compared with the equal pay rule which is widely refused in the sample since the distribution of the costs of the german energy transition is largely in line with a polluter pays rule its strong support seems to contribute to the high acceptance of the energy transition at all the main result of our econometric analysis with multivariate binary and ordered probit models is that not only some attitudinal factors like environmental values and political identification but especially economic self interest is relevant since equivalent energy expenditures have a significantly negative effect on the support of the polluter pays rule and especially equivalent income has a significantly negative effect on the preference for the ability to pay rule these results suggest that the use of distributional arguments for the criticism of energy policy measures is not necessarily value driven on the basis of real perceptions of distributive justice but can also be strategically motivated to prevent and combat economically unfavorable measures together with the strong general support of the polluter pays rule these results suggest that a sharp reorientation of the german energy transition due to distributional arguments is not very useful

the social performance and distributional consequences of contract farming an equilibrium analysis of the arachide de bouche program in senegal abstract this paper is an empirical analysis of the impact of a contract farming program in senegal we examine the access of poorer community members to contracts and the effect of the program on the income of participants the program performs very well on both counts participants and nonparticipants are indistinguishable by wealth measures and farmers increase their income substantially by participating in the program we attribute the former to the program s mobilization of local information through its use of village intermediaries permitting the substitution of social collateral for physical collateral and making the program more accessible to the poor

the measurement of preferences over the distribution of benefits the importance of the reference point this paper uses the atkinson method which was initially developed to measure the shape of the social welfare function swf in the domain of income to measure the shape of the swf with respect to the distribution of health benefits two separate studies were conducted involving a total of 71 respondents a comparison of the results across the two studies suggests that reference point effects play an important role in determining responses thus more research is needed on the role that reference point effects ought to and do play in determining the nature and extent of the efficiency equity trade off before the results of studies of this kind can be interpreted as equity parameters which may simply be plugged into an appropriately specified swf

the choice of ski areas estimation of a generalized ces preference ordering with characteristics abstrac t a generalized ces gences preference ordering is developed and estimated it incorporates characteristics of both the individual and the activities the gences is used to explain the share of ski time an individual allocates to each ski area as a function of site characteristics skiing ability and costs the stochastic specification limited the shares to the 0 1 simplex this specification was found to be more appropriate than the conventional normality assumption the null hypothesis that preferences are homothetic and additive is rejected charactenrstics ability and costs are important determinants of demand the estimated elasticities provide numerous insights into skier behavior

impact of cooperatives on smallholders commercialization behavior evidence from ethiopia this article examines the impact of marketing cooperatives on smallholder commercialization of cereals using detailed household data in rural ethiopia we use the strong government role in promoting the establishment of cooperatives to justify the use of propensity score matching to compare households that are cooperative members to similar households in comparable areas without cooperatives the analysis reveals that although cooperatives obtain higher prices for their members they are not associated with a significant increase in the overall share of cereal production sold commercially by their members however these average results hide considerable heterogeneity across households in particular we find that smaller farmers tend to reduce their marketed output as a result of higher prices whereas the opposite is true for larger farmers

the values jury to aid natural resource decisions congressional legislation emphasizes that public resource allocation should reflect the values citizens assign to those resources yet information about assigned values and preferences of members of the public including economic measures of value required by decision makers is often incomplete or unavailable existing sources of information about the public s values for use in resource allocation decisions and damage assessment include existing markets public surveys including contingent valuation and public involvement each of these sources has serious limitations

smallholder participation in contract farming comparative evidence from five countries summary supermarkets specialized wholesalers processors and agro exporters are transforming the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low income economies we develop a conceptual framework with which to study contracting between smallholders and a commodity processing firm we then synthesize results from empirical studies of contract farming arrangements in five countries ghana india madagascar mozambique and nicaragua the resulting meta narrative documents patterns of participation the welfare gains associated with participation reasons for nonparticipation the significant extent of contract noncompliance and the considerable dynamism of these value chains as farmers and firms enter and exit frequently

the measurement of individual utility and social welfare it has been suggested by a number of economists that decisions about how to allocate scarce health care resources should be informed by the cost per quality adjusted life years qalys of the different alternatives one of the criticisms of the qaly approach is that it is based on the measurement of individual utility yet the values elicited are used to inform social choice in this respect it is argued that the qaly approach fails to take account of distributional issues that are known to be important in the context of health care this paper addresses this issue and presents an approach grounded in microeconomic theory that is flexible enough to deal with a wide range of efficiency equity trade offs while making the nature of the trade off transparent in addition it is an approach that is relatively simple to investigate empirically and the results of a preliminary study are presented as illustration of this

empirical specification requirements for two constraint models of recreation choice two constraint models are common in recreation demand analysis because of the important role time can play in consumer choices two versions of roy s identity hold for these models and imply coefficient restrictions on empirical demand functions the two constraint restrictions are fully observable and can be expressed in a form analogous to the slutsky hicks equations in single constraint consumer models empirical specifications that use full prices and full budgets can be consistent with the two constraint models when the marginal value of time is either exogenous or endogenous but models with full prices and money income alone are not copyright 2001 oxford university press

measuring the cost of time in recreation demand analysis an application to sportfishing since the work of cesario and knetsch economists have recognized that the opportunity cost of time plays an important role in determining the demand for outdoor recreation the opportunities one has for spare time are more significant for consumption of time intensive outdoor recreation activities than for other commodities especially nondurables bishop and heberlein illustrate the overwhelming importance of time costs to final recreational values total consumer surplus is nearly four times as large when time costs are added at half the income rate as when time costs were set at zero p 21 despite the recognition economists have neither successfully integrated the costs of time with the methods of recreational demand analysis nor reached a consensus on how it should be measured brown charbonneau and hay state finally the apparently crucial importance of how opportunity cost of time is handled needs further work while we are convinced it is an appropriate concept exactly how it should be included and measured s remains to be determined p 24 several approaches have been taken to include it in the travel cost method one approach brown and nawas gum and martin suggests that time in transit be considered as a separate independent variable another approach bishop and heberlein brown charbonneau hay nicols bowes dwyer cesario and knetsch measures the cost of time and adds it to other costs several approaches have been suggested to measure time costs one approach is simply to choose an hourly wage e g 2 00 per hour or perhaps the minimum wage rate a more flexible but still ad hoc approach is to use some proportion of the individual s wage rate as the opportunity cost of time nichols bowes dwyer the proportion is usually taken from independent studies and used to value the travel time this approach is better than using a constant opportunity cost of time because it allows variation across individuals it suffers because the choice of the percentage of the wage rate is arbitrary independent of the sampled population cesario has discussed the consequences of ignoring time costs and the differences in values arising from alternative measurement approaches in this paper we argue that the opportunity cost of time is some proportion of the individual s market wage rate or income per hour and that this proportion can be determined from sample data this method permits the proportion to vary from one study to another rather than imposing either an arbitrary estimate or one from a sample different from the study s sample

agrifood industry transformation and small farmers in developing countries summary this article introduces this special issue on the rapid transformation of the agrifood industry in developing countries and its effects on small farmers we review the literature from the late 1980s to the present and find evidence first of food processing then retail transformation and mixed evidence of impacts on small farmers both inclusion particularly with resource providing contracts and exclusion sometimes from scale constraint sometimes from inadequate non land assets the special issue papers contribute to the debate by confirming the mix of cases of inclusion and exclusion the cases are main in horticulture and dairy key hopes for smallholder development

collective action for smallholder market access abstract the opportunity for smallholders to raise their incomes increasingly depends on their ability to compete in the market yet there are many failures in rural markets in developing countries that make it difficult for them to do this understanding how collective action can help address the inefficiencies coordination problems or barriers to market access is particularly important this paper draws on the case studies in this special issue and on other literature to examine the conceptual issues and empirical evidence on the role of collective action institutions in improving market access for the rural poor applying insights from studies of collective action in natural resource management the paper examines what conditions facilitate effective producer organizations for smallholders market access with special attention to the characteristics of user groups institutional arrangements types of products staples perishables and other commodities markets local domestic and international and external environment the paper also identifies policies and interventions that facilitate collective action for market access among smallholders and examines whether the public sector private sector and or civil society is best positioned to provide such interventions

the equity efficiency trade off in environmental policy evidence from stated preferences the design of environmental policy raises several equity issues in particular the distribution of benefits and costs at the same time it has often been argued that there is a trade off in environmental policy between equity and efficiency which brings these issues firmly to the attention of environmental economics in this paper we use a simple choice experiment to elicit individual preferences over equity efficiency trade offs in the context of two environmental problems local air pollution and global climate change we find that equity matters to people as much as efficiency does in the design and delivery of environmental policy

why research partnerships really matter innovation theory institutional arrangements and implications for developing new technology for the poor abstract this paper explores the conceptual basis for existing and emergent institutional patterns in the context of partnership approaches to technology development drawing examples from recent studies of private enterprise activity in india smallholder horticulture it suggests that agricultural innovation as a process involves a wider range of organizational types than the conventional policy focus on public sector research organizations would tend to suggest it uses the concept of a national innovation system to argue that a partnership approach is adopted as a core methodology for engaging science and technology development with the livelihood demands of the poor

better technology better plots or better farmers identifying changes in productivity and risk among malagasy rice farmers we introduce a method for properly attributing observed productivity and risk changes among new production methods farmers and plots by controlling for farmer and plot heterogeneity results from madagascar show that the new system of rice intensification sri is indeed a superior technology although about half of the observed productivity gains appear due to farmer characteristics rather than sri itself the technology generates the estimated average output gains of more than 84 the increased estimated yield risk associated with sri would nonetheless make it unattractive to many farmers within the standard range of relative risk aversion