the symmetry between controlling pollution by price and controlling it by quantity under ideally competitive conditions both controlling pollution by price using a combined charge subsidy scheme and controlling it by quantity using a marketable permit scheme can achieve short and long run efficiency and also political acceptability provided that both schemes embody the same degree of environmental ownership the resulting full symmetry between control by price and control by quantity a symmetry overlooked in the literature because of the entry exit assumptions automatically made for most subsidy schemes allows a useful practical choice to be made between the two control systems

developing effective policies for the sustainable development of ecological agriculture in china the case study of jinshan county with a systems dynamics model abstract this paper focuses on a search for concrete policy measures to facilitate the overall sustainability of ecological agricultural development at a county level for this purpose a system dynamics model aiseem has been developed to explore the potential long term ecological economic institutional and social interactions of ecological agricultural development through a case study of jinshan county in china the model provides an experimental platform for the simulation and analysis of alternative policy scenarios the results indicate that the diversification of land use patterns government low interest loans and government support for training are important policy measures for promoting the sustainable development of ecological agriculture at least in the case study context in addition the study reveals that environmentally sound technology e g biogas project alone cannot sufficiently induce farmers to adopt ecological agricultural practices limited availability of information risk aversion and high transaction costs are major barriers to the adoption of alternative agricultural practices in this regard the importance of capacity building and institutional arrangements are emphasised through the development of an improved policy making process on agricultural sustainability this case study highlights the importance of combining the ecological economics analytical framework with the system dynamics modelling approach as a feasible integrated tool to provide insight into the policy analysis of ecological agriculture and thus set a solid basis for effective policy making to facilitate its sustainable development on a regional scale

evaluating the impact of agricultural extension on farms performance in crete a nonneutral stochastic frontier approach this article attempts to integrate the production and the efficiency based approaches for evaluating the impact of extension on farms performance for this purpose the nonneutral production frontier model is used and the empirical analysis refers to a sample of farms from crete greece the empirical results support the proposed formulation instead of either the production or the efficiency based formulations as extension was found to have a statistically significant effect on closing both the technology and management gaps public and private extension services were found to be competitive in the production function and complementary in the technical inefficiency effect function in addition farms using both public and private extension services achieved a higher degree of technical efficiency than those using either public or private extension services and farms with no extension services were found to be the least efficient

who should abate carbon emission we review the optimal pattern of carbon emission abatements across countries in a simple multi country world we model explicitly with the model in chichilnisky 4 the fact that the atmosphere is a public good within this framework we establish conditions for it to be necessary for optimality that the marginal cost of abatement be the same in all countries these condition are quite restrictive and amount to either ignoring distributional issues between countries or operating within a framework within which lump sum transfers can be made between countries these results have implications for the use of tradeable emission permits which as normally advocated will lead to the equalization of marginal abatement costs across countries the observation that the atmosphere is a public good implies that we may need to look at a lindahl equilibrium rather than a walrasian equilibrium in tradeable permits

ecological and economic sustainability in fishery management a multi agent model for understanding competition and cooperation recent studies have shown that many marine ecosystems are experiencing an accelerating loss of population and biodiversity it is apparent that there is a growing disparity between the available supply of fish and the desire of the growing world population to catch them although studies have begun to question the ecological sustainability of managed fishery systems they often omit the corresponding effects on the economic sustainability of fishery industries this is particularly important in rural coastal areas where the fishing industry is often a dominant employer in this article we analyze the interactions between economic and ecological dynamic systems using a multi agent dynamic model of fishery management multiple agents fishers harvest multiple fish species and adapt the amount and allocation of their effort to their value functions which are given as net profits of the fish harvest sold for a market price this is largely unique in fishery models since many econometric studies view fishers as represented by homogenous average agents we introduce and compare two different decision rules governing the behavior of fishers engaged in a competitive market we demonstrate a situation where both behaviors lead to a decline of all fish stocks as well as profits for most fishers as an alternative we introduce a cooperative approach in which fisheries jointly set sustainable limits for total harvest and effort that are then distributed to the fishers according to distribution rules the simulation reveals that fish stocks and profits can stabilize at significantly higher levels in the cooperative case leading to a continuous accumulation of capital for all fishers this model demonstrates key aspects of overfishing conflicts that can be overcome through planned fishing quotas and cooperative market mechanisms it also demonstrates a novel approach for simulating the dynamic behavior of heterogeneous fishers

efficiency in agricultural production the case of peasant farmers in eastern paraguay abstract this paper contributes to the productivity literature in developing country agriculture by quantifying the level of efficiency for a sample of peasant farmers from eastern paraguay a stochastic efficiency decomposition methodology is used to derive technical allocative and economic efficiency measures separately for cotton and cassava an average economic efficiency of 40 1 for cotton and of 52 for cassava is found which suggests considerable room for productivity gains for the farms in the sample through better use of available resources given the state of technology gains in output through productivity growth have become increasingly important to paraguay as the opportunities to bring additional virgin lands into cultivation have significantly diminished in recent years no clear strategy to improve farm productivity could be gleaned from an examination of the relationship between efficiency and various socioeconomic variables one possible explanation for this finding is the existence of a stage of development threshold below which there is no consistent relationship between socioeconomic variables and productivity if this is the case then our results suggest that this sample of paraguayan peasants are yet to reach such a threshold hence improvements in educational and extension services for example would be needed to go beyond this threshold once this is accomplished additional productivity gains would be obtained by further investments in human capital and related factors

efficiency differentials in peasant agriculture and their implications for development policies this paper reviews the theoretical and empirical work on allocative efficiency in traditional agriculture and presents a new study of technical efficiency among tanzanian cotton farmers the theoretical arguments are shown to apply primarily in a competitive context that differs significantly from that in which peasant farms operate re analysis of earlier empirical studies shows that on average the marginal value products of inputs differ by more than 40 per cent from the marginal factor costs to which they should be equated under allocative efficiency our own study among tanzanian cotton farmers in geita district reveals that output could be increased by 51 per cent if all farmers achieved those levels of technical efficiency that were in fact achieved by the best farmers in the sample using the same inputs and technologies that the less efficient used these results indicate that the efficiency hypothesis may not be applicable to much of peasant agriculture and that development policies might fruitf

cutting the gordian knot in climate change policy ongoing conflict over the fair allocation of greenhouse gas emissions among nations is a significant impediment to progress in international climate change negotiations this article considers the strengths and weaknesses of a crucial argument within the allocation debate asserting the atmospheric capacity to absorb greenhouse gases should be distributed on an equal per capita basis while noting the argument s many appealing qualities the paper argues that the per capita perspective also encompasses important practical and ethical limitations besides potentially encouraging population growth and discriminating against those with greater but still legitimate energy needs early evidence suggests that the equal per capita idea may hinder progress in climate change talks by invoking a more absolutist and uncompromising rhetoric of rights alternative ideas of fairness such as the distinction between subsistence and luxury emissions or the common heritage of mankind idea offer a more flexible mix of egalitarian and other allocation principles that should be considered carefully even by those sympathetic to the equal per capita perspective

externality effects of education dynamics of the adoption and diffusion of an innovation in rural ethiopia abstract this article investigates the role of schooling at the household and community levels in the adoption and diffusion of agricultural innovations in rural ethiopia we find that household level education is important to the timing of adoption but less crucial to the question of whether a household has ever adopted fertilizer since those without schooling may eventually copy the educated community level education substitutes for low levels of household education encouraging uneducated farmers to adopt sooner than would be predicted in the absence of educated neighbors moreover community level education is complementary to household education in determining which farmers will eventually adopt thus evidence is presented to suggest that there are two externality effects educated farmers are early innovators providing an example that may be copied by less educated farmers and educated farmers are better able to copy those who innovate first enhancing diffusion of the new technology more wide

education and technical efficiency in small farm production differences in technical efficiency are observed as differences in the physical output produced from a given bundle of physical inputs these differences are not considered in the traditional theory of the firm wherein the output resulting from a particular input bundle is specified as the maximum possible according to the latest technology presupposing technical efficiency the theory of the firm concentrates on allocative efficiency on the choice of the particular input bundle that maximizes profit given prices and the technically efficient production function the best utilization of any particular input combination according to henderson and quandt is a technical not an economic problem 1 economic theory notwithstanding empirical studies of production must take into account differences in the utilization of inputs since in the real world producers are not all equally efficient it is conceptually convenient to divide the output variation observed over a number of firms into two parts one that stems from variation in physical inputs and another that reflects differences in technical efficiency timmer has developed an approach by which to compare the technical efficiency of firms using linear programming he determines the function that relates physical inputs to output for the most efficient of a sample of firms in other words he finds the production surface that is the envelope of all the observation points he calls this function the technical frontier the relative tech

the development of renewable energy in resource rich region a case in china abstract with the largest population living in rural areas the lack of clean energy supply is an important problem in china and the utilization of renewable energy not only meets the demand of energy but also provides a basis for environmental protection and sustainable development this paper reviews use of clean energy in a resource rich region including the basic principle of the development of recycling agriculture the potential the present status and the future of renewable energy in the region rural areas if the project will be finished there will be 300 000 families benefiting from it and it can bring at least 2 2 108 us dollars revenue increase directly the indirect revenue increase will be 0 15 billion us dollars the environment will be improved and the living standard in jincheng s rural areas is also be greatly improved because of developing biogas project based on the developing status and constraint conditions the solutions to further promote renewable energy projects in this region are also proposed

reducing conflicts between climate policy and energy policy in the us the important role of the states the absence of us national action on global climate change policy has prompted initiatives by the us congress cities states and regions toward what is likely to become a long term collaborative effort to harmonize national energy and climate policies this upward evolution in the face of a reluctant administration is historically consistent with the development of national legislation on other environmental and social issues in the us at the heart of this movement is the need to resolve conflicts between high intensity use of low cost fossil energy supplies and the dominating impact of carbon dioxide emissions on global climate change us states are among the largest carbon dioxide emitters in the world and play a critical role in supplying and transforming energy as well as consuming it for economic advantage state governments are also likely to have to shoulder some of the cost of potentially extensive climate damages and bear the brunt of the cost of implementing future federal mandates as a result many are taking proactive stances on the development of climate mitigation policy to prepare for accelerate and or guide national policy as us states show leadership on addressing greenhouse gas emissions they also play an important role in forging policies and measures that reduce economic conflict between energy and climate goals a number have launched or completed greenhouse gas mitigation plans and other major policies in the past few years that address these conflicts through 1 finding ways to reduce mitigation costs including the use of incentive based policy instruments 2 promoting an open and democratic policy process that includes major stakeholders 3 promoting equity across socioeconomic groups regions and generations and 4 promoting interregional cooperation the results are promising and suggest that the state arena for climate and energy policy is evolving quickly and constructively toward alternatives that reduce conflict regional efforts are also unfolding along with greater congressional attention to the lessons learned and commitments made by sub federal actions in the next few years many national energy and climate conflicts are likely to be tested and addressed by states among these pennsylvania is likely to be an important player due to its high profile of energy production and potential for leadership

how to define and study farmers management capacity theory and use in agricultural economics textbooks and articles on farm management stress the importance of the management capacity of the farmer with respect to his farm results however explicit definitions together with an elaboration of this concept are hard to find in this article aspects of management capacity are grouped into 1 personal aspects consisting of farmer s drives and motivations farmer s abilities and capabilities and his biographical facts such as age and education and 2 aspects of the decision making process consisting of practices and procedures with respect to planning implementation and control of decisions at the farm empirical studies on the role of management capacity in relation to farm results are reviewed frontier production functions are widely used in recent literature to estimate technical and economic efficiency of farms however in explaining differences in efficiency most studies do not go further than adding a biographical variable e g level of education this study concludes that a next step would be to include aspects of the decision making process longitudinal on farm observations which give possibilities for studying the dynamic aspects of the decision making are suggested to further analyze the concept of management capacity

who should abate carbon emissions an international viewpoint abstract we review the optimal pattern of carbon emission abatements across countries in a simple multi country world we model explicitly with the model in chichilnisky 1993b the fact that the atmosphere is a public good within this framework we establish conditions for it to be necessary for optimality that the marginal cost of abatement be the same in all countries these conditions are quite restrictive and amount to either ignoring distributional issues between countries or operating within a framework within which lump sum transfers can be made between countries these results have implications for the use of tradeable emission permits which as normally advocated will lead to the equalization of marginal abatement costs across countries the observation that the atmosphere is a public good implies that we may need to look at a lindahl equilibrium rather than a walrasian equilibrium in tradeable permits

education and technical efficiency during the green revolution in pakistan tion is more likely to arise during disequilibrium caused by technical change in agriculture this may be because technical change renders the existing cultural practices obsolete or inadequate and calls for an adjustment a more educated farmer is supposed to make the required adjustment more quickly this article tests the foregoing hypothesis in pakistan agriculture during the green revolution when introduction of new crop varieties disturbed the prevailing equilibrium for this purpose a production function approach is used and the analysis is conducted not only for the new crop varieties but also for their traditional counterparts the results lend support to the hypothesis by showing that the worker effect is stronger for new crop varieties than it is for traditional ones the article is divided into five sections in the next section a brief review of the literature is presented section iii presents the hypothesis and discusses the methodology used for the analysis the results and their policy implications are discussed in section iv and section v concludes the article ii brief literature review in a pioneering study exploring the economic effects of education z griliches used production function analysis to highlight the contri

profits from self employment the case of cote d ivoire abstract in the past self employed workers were often viewed as less productive individuals yet recent research has indicated that the nonagricultural self employed fill a niche in the economy that large industry cannot the goods and services they produce may well be a necessary part of the infrastructure within which large scale industry can flourish this paper examines the productivity of nonagricultural family enterprises in cote d ivoire marginal returns to self employed labor are somewhat less than the wage rate of equivalent salaried workers capital yields extremely high returns in self employment possibly above 100 per month assuming limited access to credit the self employed may do well by establishing enterprises and gaining the large returns to capital that offset the somewhat lower returns to labor

ecological economics in china origins dilemmas and prospects abstract this paper is a first step towards articulating a chinese version of ecological economics over the last decade ecological economics has attracted increasing attention in the west similarly since the early 1980s scholars in china have undertaken specific research on existing ecological economic issues in accordance with chinese political economic socio cultural and ecological conditions however this endeavor is hardly known in the west and little attention has been given so far to the potential role of chinese attitudes in the international ecological economics movement this paper is designed to make up for that neglect and attempts to address the following questions what social and cultural traditions are required for chinese ecological economics to operate what are the political and institutional implications of ecological economics in china will chinese ecological economists feel comfortable in a society where open debate is viewed as unacceptable behavior in order to clarify the chinese interpretation of ecological economics and its impact on the policy making process a preliminary overview of its emerging background evolutionary history key viewpoints and theories nature and policy influence is presented three major intellectual sources of chinese ecological economics are identified and the theoretical applications are emphasized then some theoretical and practical issues that may arise in future research are discussed along with implications of chinese ecological economics for the international community in addition to biophysical functions and ecological conditions socio political structures and processes need to be explicitly addressed in extending the research agenda of ecological economics

ecological economics as a policy science rhetoric or commitment towards an improved decision making process on sustainability abstract with sustainability issues currently attracting increasing political and policy attention this paper examines the impact of the rise of ecological economics in the policy world and its potential influence on the decision making process this study emphasises that ecological economics development is coevolved with and modified to fit specific social economic political and cultural contexts as a policy science ecological economics is context sensitive and action oriented explaining why it is so and what to do about it has become imperative for ecological economists this paper attempts to address the questions such as what are the macroeconomic conditions and political processes that make the formulation and implementation of ecological economic policy possible how should this alternative social reality engage with the dominant decision making process does ecological economics provide the necessary means for prescribing policy measures to achieve sustainable development endeavouring to understand these dimensions of ecological economics has been a dynamic social process and understanding this complex process might provide an opportunity to bridge the divide between policy rhetoric and reality in practice rather than maintain the status quo in order to achieve an improved decision making process on sustainability it highlights the imperative to explicitly study the institutional setting through which sustainable development policy discourse is mediated

recasting alternative agriculture as a management model the value of adept scaling abstract this paper identifies the significance of scale considerations as applied to agricultural resource management scaling is the act of defining the spatiotemporal level or levels of interest when attempting problem solving a goal commonly proposed by the diverse interests working toward an alternative agriculture is sustainability to date advocates of sustainability have failed to scale meaningfully both their critique of conventional agriculture and the alternatives they represent because sustainability is inherently sensitive to changes in analytic context i e is scale relative in the absence of explicit scaling sustainability is unworkable as a measure of system performance the importance of scale as applied to the concept of sustainability in hierarchical systems has been noted lowrance et al 1986 am j altern agric 1 169 173 however the implications of this finding have not been confronted in the subsequent literature going beyond lowrance et al 1986 this paper describes the error that accompanies improperly scaled assessment of agricultural sustainability and identifies two important considerations that emerge through explicit scaling 1 the necessity of consistent and timely integration of local information into upper level decision making and 2 the necessity of recognizing the scalar level of the downside of resource allocation trade offs and addressing them accordingly the first of these considerations suggests the need for agricultural systems that are resilient to collapse from unpredictable and potentially fundamental disturbance through incorporation of local information it is possible to maintain coherent strategies aimed at upper level objectives e g biodiversity conservation while supporting the integrity of lower level sub systems e g community economic vitality the second consideration that arises from explicit scaling indicates the value of developing systems which are buffered against political paralysis caused by negative impacts of resource allocation decisions victims or losers result from allocation and reallocation functions these individuals and or institutions must be addressed recent enthusiasm regarding win win scenarios in many cases is buoyed by scaling error explicit recognition of the implications of necessary trade offs both positive and negative promotes the development of mechanisms to support losers failure to confront the fact that losers are consistently produced exaggerates the negative impact they have on system performance we define holistic management as identifying assimilating and acting on information in a manner consonant with the contextual spatiotemporal scale of the problem at hand the fundamental challenge facing agriculture is integration of multiple considerations across levels in the system explicitly scaled analysis and action in a holistic setting is proposed as a means by which alternative agriculture can respond to this challenge

positive externalities of domestic biogas initiatives implications for financing domestic biogas programs are often justified on the basis of the private benefits and costs accruing to the individual households in terms of providing a superior cooking fuel improved indoor air quality and saving of time spent on collecting firewood this paper contends however that the economic surpluses from domestic biogas programs are realized beyond such narrowly defined project boundaries the paper maintains that economic value addition from the consumptive use of the biogas for cooking and the non consumptive and indirect value derived from the biogas plant providing feedstock for other processes and other such benefits as greenhouse gas mitigation positive externalities need to be accounted for the process approach adopted by this paper would enable an integrated view of the value chain and consequently a mechanism to reallocate costs and to distribute such surpluses

energy price slump and policy response in the coal chemical industry district a case study of ordos with a system dynamics model we employ system dynamics method towards a coal chemical industry district economy evolution model using coal industry the coal chemical industry their downstream industries and the manufacture related service industry moreover we construct energy price and policy response scenarios based on ordos management experience the results show that the energy price slump had a negative impact on the overall economic development of the coal chemical industry district despite promoting non resource industries furthermore policies had different effects on the industry s output value and profit in the long term developing alternative industries ai helps increase the industrial output value and profit decreasing value added tax vat has immediate results and a distinctive effect on industrial short term production value and profit its long term effect being limited the effect of production limit pl on industrial profit is stronger than output value and financial support fs is more conducive to improve the latter however coal mining and coal chemical loan increases decrease the gross industrial profit level technology innovation ti has the best individual policy overall effect on production value and profits furthermore the simultaneous implementation of pl ti and ai can generate the synergy effect for each of them and the simultaneous implementation of vat and one or couple of other policies will generate the crowding out effect both for vat and other policies

farmer education and farm efficiency in nepal the role of schooling extension services and cognitive skills this paper reports on the analysis of data from nepal the farm households surveyed were chosen so that about half were in a region exposed to the newly introduced training and visit t v extension service while the other half were exposed to less intensive traditional extension services thus in addition to providing information on the mechanisms of education s effects on efficiency this study evaluates the impact of t v extension as introduced in nepal our study finds a positive effect of education on efficiency for the three major crops but only with wheat was the effect statistically significant at standard levels there is definite evidence of a threshold level of education 6 years below which education s impact is small and above which the effect is important the effect of education on efficiency is important only for adapting to changing circumstances we found no evidence that education s effects should be attributed even in part to family background correlates or to a measure we had of ability the farmer s numeracy did affect productivity in wheat production our measures of modernity and agricultural knowledge were uncorrelated with efficiency

investigating the determinants of household welfare in cote d ivoire to predict the effect of economic policies on household welfare one should first understand which characteristics of households and of the localities in which they live enable them to raise their welfare levels this paper outlines a simple procedure for investigating the determinants of household welfare and demonstrates its use with recent data from cote d ivoire despite the relative simplicity much information is obtained from its use on cross sectional survey data results specific to cote d ivoire include high low returns to education in urban rural areas high benefits from cocoa land relative to coffee land a significant impact on economic welfare from the availability of medical services and no apparent benefits from agricultural extension services

reducing conflict in global warming policy the potential of equity as a unifying principle abstract international agreement on global warming mitigation is likely to prove difficult efficiency based policies will result in disparate costs and benefits among nations and thus hinder cooperation this paper suggests that consideration be given to an equitable sharing of the economic impacts of global warming policy acknowledging that there is no universally held concept of equity the policy implications of several alternatives are explored because there is considerable variation in these implications it will be important for decision makers to clarify their preferred concepts of equity during the course of their negotiations on policies to address global warming