patterns of agrarian transition karen macoursuniversity of california berkeley and katholieke universiteit leuvenjohan f m swinneneuropean commission and katholieke universiteit leuveni introductioneconomic reforms have induced important output and productivity changesin the agricultural sectors of transition countries tcs there are however large differences between the countries in terms of the direction and themagnitude of these changes for example agricultural output increased con siderably in the east asian tcs while there was a large output fall in thecentral and east european countries ceecs and the former soviet union fsu during transition g 1

tenure land rights and farmer investment incentives in china the goal of this paper is to understand the nature of the property rights associated with china s land tenure systems and to study the impact of these property rights on agricultural production efficiency the results show that land tenure and associated property rights in rural china affect the production behavior of farmers the most robust finding is that the right to use land for long periods of time encourages the use of land saving investments while the results show that land tenure affects agricultural production decisions the difference between collective and private plots however is small compared to the private plotcommunal productivity gap that existed in the pre reform period 1998 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

allocative efficiency of technically inefficient production units we discuss how to measure allocative efficiency without presuming technical efficiency this is relevant when it is easier to introduce reallocations than improvements of technical efficiency we compare the approach to the traditional one of assuming technical efficiency before measuring allocative efficiency in particular we develop necessary and sufficient conditions in the technology to ensure consistent measures we suggest alternative interpretations of the approaches and we relate them to motivational and organizational change perspectives

tenure security and land related investment evidence from ethiopia the authors use a large data set from ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and transferability to explore determinants of different types of land related investment and its possible impact on productivity while they find some support for endogeneity of investment in trees this is not the case for terraces transfer rights are unambiguously investment enhancing the large productivity effect of terracing implies that even where households undertake investments to increase their tenure security this may not be socially efficient in ethiopia government action to increase tenure security and transferability of land rights can significantly enhance rural investment and productivity

waste performance of nuts 2 regions in the eu a conditional directional distance benefit of the doubt model abstract this paper attempts to benchmark the municipal solid waste msw management performance of the nuts 2 regions in the eu by constructing a composite indicator in order to account for commensurability weighting and aggregation issues of the performance indicators in regional waste and materials management this paper advocates a conditional directional distance version of the benefit of the doubt weighting technique in addition the waste management hierarchy defined by the eu is strongly embedded in the construction of our composite indicator the results reveal considerable differences in the aggregate performance of the regions even within member states in general waste sectors of the nuts 2 regions in austria belgium and germany generally do well in terms of msw management our results also reveal that some differences in the operating environment of the regions such as the number of tourist overnight stays are related to the aggregate performance of the regions however the observation that other conditions are not significantly related to the performance on a regional level is interesting as many policy makers frequently argue that the level of performance in their regions cannot be compared to that in other regions precisely due to this difference in operating conditions

fiscal federalism quantitative studies we often think of fiscal decisions as being made by a single government but in the united states the reality is that an astounding number of entities have the power to tax and spend state local and federal governments all play crucial roles in the u s fiscal system and the interrelation has been the source of continuing controversy this fact is the focus of the seven papers and commentaries presented in this volume the result of a conference sponsored by the nber the contributors use various quantitative tools to study policy issues obtaining results that will interest policymakers and researchers working in the areas of taxation and public finance the first three papers study the distribution of power and responsibilities among the various levels of government john joseph wallis and wallace e oates look at the extend and evolution of decentralization in the state and local sector robert p inman examines the growth of federal grants and the structure of congressional decision making and jeffrey s zax investigates the effects of the number of government jurisdictions on aggregate local public debt and expenditures the next three papers look at the deductibility of state and local taxes on federal tax returns using an econometric analysis douglas holtz eakin and harvey s rosen examine the effects of deductibility on revenue sources and level of expenditures lawrence b lindsey looks at how deductibility affects the level and type of taxation george r zodrow uses a two sector general equilibrium model to investigate revenue effects of deductibility finally charles r hulten and robert m schwab analyze the problem of developing an accurate estimate of income for the state and local sector finding that conventional accounting procedures have underestimated the income generated by a startling 100 billion

policy reform and productivity change in chinese agriculture a distance function approach abstract agricultural policy reform has been an important source of change in the chinese agricultural sector the reforms led to productivity growth and helped china to pursue its self sufficiency goal especially in the grain sector in order to analyze whether observable productivity growth stems from technologically induced components or from the market induced parts a multi input multi output model is derived by using an econometric distance function framework a decomposition allows to distinguish allocative effects scale effects technological change and technical efficiency change data on farms in zhejiang from 1986 to 2000 are used to analyze the impact of policy reform

review of environmental efficiency and its influencing factors in china 1998 2009 abstract improving environmental efficiency has been regarded as an objective requirement and an inevitable path to build a resource saving and environment friendly society in china the slacks based measurement sbm model with undesirable output is applied to measure the environmental efficiency of provinces in china from 1998 to 2009 then by the tobit model we can empirically test the impact of influencing factors on the environmental efficiency it demonstrates the low value of the environmental efficiency of each province with an essentially descending trend on the whole and the distinct differences between the environmental efficiency of those provinces besides gdp per capita dependent on foreign capital and trade environmental awareness and population density have obviously positive impacts on environmental efficiency and the proportion of the secondary industry in the gdp shows a significantly negative impact on the environmental efficiency

how does land fragmentation affect off farm labor supply panel data evidence from china abstract this article provides a deeper theoretical understanding of the linkages between land fragmentation and off farm labor supply in china andinvestigates this relationship empirically in a more direct way than does the existing literature drawing upon a rural household panel data setcollected in zhejiang hubei and yunnan provinces from 1995 to 2002 we estimate the effects in two steps first we estimate the effect of landfragmentation on labor productivity second we estimate the effect of land fragmentation on off farm labor supply the production function resultsshow that land fragmentation indeed leads to lower agricultural labor productivity implying that land consolidation will make on farm work moreattractive and thus decrease off farm labor supply however the effect of land consolidation on off farm labor supply is not signi cant one likelyexplanation for this result may be the potentially imperfect labor markets jel classi cations j22 q15 q24 r23 keywords

multi dimensional screening a user s guide abstract multi dimensional screening models have many potential applications but economists have so far been hindered by the considerable technical difficulties involved in their resolution this paper studies the simplest formulation of the general screening model and we provide a complete solution to this case we then show how this model can be applied to multi product nonlinear pricing and to multi product monopoly regulation finally we discuss how the model has been applied to other economic situations of interest including auction design and optimal taxation

does rising landlessness signal success or failure for vietnam s agrarian transition in the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land use rights vietnam is experiencing a pronounced rise in rural landlessness to some observers this is a harmless by product of a more efficient economy while to others it signals the return of the pre socialist class structure with the rural landless at the bottom of the economic ladder the authors theoretical model suggests that removing restrictions on land markets will increase landlessness among the poor but that there will be both gainers and losers with uncertain impacts on aggregate poverty empirically they find that landlessness is less likely for the poor and that the observed rise in landlessness is poverty reducing on balance however there are marked regional differences notably between the north and the south

tax competition and revelation of preferences for public expenditure this paper considers a federal country composed of local jurisdictions that differ in their inhabitants tastes for public goods and which finance local public expenditure through a source based tax on capital income the taste for public goods is the private information of local governments the central government seeks an optimal policy in which grants to local governments are conditioned on local tax rates the uninformed central government seeks both to allocate capital efficiently among jurisdictions and to induce jurisdictions to provide an efficient mix of private and public consumption it is shown that there persist at this constrained optimum both some misallocation of capital and some violation of the samuelson rule for optimal public good provision in every jurisdiction c 1998 academic press

mixed strategy nash equilibrium in data envelopment analysis abstract in a typical productivity analysis the efficiency measure assumes a perfectly competitive market with an endogenous price and depends on a fixed orientation with respect to a specific firm such as an input oriented measure when an imperfectly competitive market affects the endogenous price however firms may take a mixed strategy approach to address uncertain competition this study proposes a mixed strategy measure msm we construct a model embedded with a data envelopment analysis dea framework that identifies the mixed strategy nash equilibrium in the first stage and considers a probabilistic and multi oriented efficiency measure in the second stage based on the environmental regulation and a typical nash measure we create two indices environmental consistency and strategic consistency to support the business roadmap development we validate the proposed msm with an empirical study of china s electric power industry the results find that the proposed msm complements the nash measure and the msm model successfully supports our two managerial strategies invest in capacity expansion or develop emission abatement technology

a decomposition of profit loss under output price uncertainty in this paper firm profit loss is decomposed as the sum of two terms related to the output price uncertainty price expectation error and risk preference plus one extra term expressing technical inefficiency we then describe the implementation of our theoretical model in a robust data envelopment analysis dea framework which allows an effective and separate estimation of each term of the decomposition in addition we offer an operational tool to reveal producers risk preferences a 2009 database of french fattening pig farms is used as an illustration our results indicate that risk preference and technical inefficiency are the main sources of profit loss

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

the effect of land tenure governance on technical efficiency evidence from three provinces in eastern china this study aims to identify the mechanisms through which land tenure governance affects the technical efficiency of grain production in an integrated framework and to examine the impacts of the public governance village self governance and relational governance of land tenure on the technical efficiency of contracted land and rented in land farm level survey data collected from liaoning jiangxi and jiangsu provinces covering the years of 2014 and 2015 is used for the empirical analysis the findings indicate that i public governance associated with land certification significantly increases the technical efficiency of grain production ii village self governance and administrative land reallocations can serve as substitutes for the land rental market in optimizing the distribution of land resources and improving technical efficiency and iii compared to multi year transfer contracts both annual and open ended transfer contracts have negative impacts on technical efficiency

toward a theory of regulation for developing countries following jean jacques laffont s lead the efficient operation and expansion of infrastructures in developing countries is crucial for growth and poverty reduction however recent reforms aimed at improving the performance of these sectors have had limited success evidence suggests that in many instances this was because the traditional regulatory theory relied on by policymakers was not suitable for the institutional context in developing countries this article surveys more recent theoretical work focusing on problems with regulation in these countries at the heart of the survey is the work of jean jacques laffont who in the last decade of his life set about developing a theoretical framework for regulation in developing countries we consider the implications of his work which focused on the key institutional limitations faced in developing countries we then discuss where experience suggests that there are important omissions from this modeling bringing in extensions and alternative approaches pursued by other authors we conclude by summarizing the key ways in which regulatory policy will be different when institutions are weak overall we find that an understanding of the institutional context and its implications are crucial when designing a regulatory framework for developing countries

local public works and intergovernmental transfers under asymmetric information abstract this paper studies local public works decisions in a hierarchical setting under bidimensional asymmetric information a local authority plans to undertake a public work and delegates its construction to a firm the federal government decides whether to fund the project without being informed of either the project s benefit or the constructor s efficiency the local authority knows these values to deal with this informational gap the federal government designs a public work contract specifying transfers to the local authority and to the firm we show under which circumstances cost sharing and compensations emerge as incentive devices then we identify which projects are effectively constructed more works with low high benefits are undertaken shut down than under full information

measuring ecological efficiency with data envelopment analysis dea abstract the measurement of ecological efficiency provides some important information for the companies environmental management ecological efficiency is usually measured by comparing environmental performance indicators data envelopment analysis dea shows a high potential to support such comparisons as no explicit weights are needed to aggregate the indicators in general dea assumes that inputs and outputs are goods but from an ecological perspective also bads have to be considered in the literature bads are treated in different and sometimes arbitrarily chosen ways this article aims at the systematic derivation of ecologically extended dea models starting from the assumptions of dea in production theory and activity analysis a generalisation of basic dea models is derived by incorporating a multi dimensional value function f extended preference structures can be considered by different specifications of f e g specifications for ecologically motivated applications of dea

on the technical in efficiency of a profit maximum abstract in general production theoretical analysis aims at identifying an enterprise s technically efficient production alternatives according to the principles of economy achieving technical efficiency is considered as a prerequisite for a producer s further optimization behaviour and therefore as a matter of rationality we will show in our article however that it might be economically unfounded to focus only on technically efficient production alternatives using a nonlinear inequality constrained optimization framework we demonstrate that a profit maximizing production may imply technical inefficiency i e in graphical terms depending on the topology of the profit function the optimal input output combination may be located in the interior of the producer s production possibilities set in order to show this we establish mathematical and economic conditions for the profit maximization approach to yield a technically efficient or inefficient solution respectively in fact inefficient solutions emerge when input or output prices are not strictly positive over the entire domain and or the objective function is non monotonic we highlight some non pathological economic situations that are likely to set the stage for technically inefficient profit maxima and provide an example that illustrates how an enterprise can make use of this approach in order to improve profits by choosing technically inefficient production points in spite of those optimal inefficiencies economic environments with positive prices and technical efficiency of the optimum shall remain the normal case

sharing budgetary austerity under free mobility and asymmetric information an optimal regulation approach to fiscal federalism in the present article tiebout meets laffont and tirole in the land of fiscal federalism a non trivial principal multi agent model is used to characterize the optimal intergovernmental grant schedule when the cost of local public goods depends on hidden characteristics and actions of local governments and under citizen free mobility we show how informational rents landlords interests and citizen mobility interact to produce distortions at both ends of the type space in particular the most efficient jurisdictions should overproduce and overtax in second best optimum informational asymmetries decrease the average production of public goods and increase the inter jurisdictional variance of taxes and public good production

energy and environmental efficiency of china s transportation sectors under the constraints of energy consumption and environmental pollutions abstract the rapid growth of the economy in china has caused many problems for the country particularly the energy shortage and environmental pollution thus establishing a sustainable development of society has attracted considerable attention in recent years in this paper we evaluate the sustainability efficiency in terms of energy usage and environmental impact by using a new equilibrium efficient frontier data envelopment analysis eefdea approach for the first time dea is used in the context of required fixed reductions in both total energy consumption and total environmental pollution which is a realistic context that introduces a zero sum aspect to the problem as part of the analysis the generalized equilibrium efficient frontier eef is constructed based on minimum satisfaction degree maximization of all units considering both minimum and maximum adjustment strategy while most existing studies only minimized the weighted sum reduction finally the sustainability efficiency of transportation sectors of china s 30 main regions is analyzed by using our proposed model the results show that more effective measures should be taken for sustainable development

the technology gap and efficiency measure in wec countries application of the hybrid meta frontier model this study develops the hybrid meta frontier dea model for which inputs are distinguished into radial inputs that change proportionally and non radial inputs that change non proportionally in order to measure the technical efficiency and technology gap ratios tgr of four different regions asia africa america and europe this paper selects 87 countries that are members of the world energy council from 2005 to 2007 the input variables are industry and population while the output variances are gross domestic product gdp and the amount of fossil fuel co2 emissions the result shows that countries efficiency ranking among their own region presents more implied volatility in view of the technology gap ratio europe is the most efficient of any region but during the same period asia has a lower efficiency than other regions finally regions with higher industry or gdp might not have higher efficiency from 2005 to 2007 and higher co2 emissions or population also might not mean lower efficiency for other regions in addition brazil is not oecd member but it is higher efficiency than other oecd members in emerging countries case oecd countries are better efficiency than non oecd countries and europe is higher than asia to control co2 emissions if non oecd countries or asia countries could reach the best efficiency score they should try to control co2 emissions

efficiency evaluation and dynamic evolution of china s regional green economy a method based on the super pebm model and dea window analysis abstract given the current circumstances of increasingly serious resource consumption and environmental pollution the development of china s green economy will profoundly impact the nation s future economic prosperity and even global economic development based on panel data from 2008 to 2017 this paper measures the green economic efficiency gee of chinese regions and analyzes its dynamic evolution using time series based on a novel data envelopment analysis dea model using environmental dea techniques this paper introduces the super pebm ebm based on pearson correlation coefficient model which is developed from the epsilon based measure ebm model and combines super pebm with the window analysis method firstly environmental dea technology is used to analyze gee at the regional level in china secondly based on panel data the window analysis method is used to analyze the regional differences of china s regional gee finally the development trend of china s regional gee in different time windows is obtained by combining the super pebm model and window analysis the empirical analysis results using panel data for regions in china from 2008 to 2017 show that 1 the overall gee of china is slowly increasing and the regional differences are still significant and 2 the improvement of gee can help to reduce regional differences

investment and equity effects of land regularisation the case of nicaragua we use data from nicaragua to examine the impact of award of registered and non registered title on land values and changes in land attached investment registration acquisition through purchase and agrarian reform title all are associated with significant increases in the value of plots receipt of registered title is found to increase land values by 30 and at the same time greatly increase the propensity to invest bringing such investment closer to the optimum in line with descriptive statistics indicating great demand for land right regularisation especially from the poor this suggests that titling can have a positive distributional effect at the same time the legal validity and official recognition of the titles issued appears to be of great importance

how much expropriation hazard is too much the effect of land reallocation on organic fertilizer usage in rural china in china land is reallocated on either a full scale or a partial basis by employing a unique farm survey that deliberately draws a distinction between full scale and partial land reallocations and by decomposing their respective expropriation risk effects we find that the significantly negative effect of expropriation risk on organic fertilizer usage is driven solely by full scale reallocation consistent with this finding a reduction in the predicted expropriation hazard rate by half leads to a sizable increase of 491 in organic fertilizer usage in villages with a history of full scale reallocation and has an estimated productivity effect of 19 1

infrastructure investment a review essay economists try not to be faddists but they often cannot help themselves while work on a topic should mirror the prospective importance of the topic that situation seems to occur with disappointing frequency instead the usual pattern is that some reasonably important topic will be totally ignored for the longest time then recognized and then the subject of a flurry of work all out of proportion to its likely long run importance nowhere has this speculative bubble of economic research been more clearly illustrated than with infrastructure investment macroeconomists havelong felt that the stock of public capital is an important factor input in the production of total output macroeconomists have known that u s productivity growth slowed dramatically in about 1973 and macroeconomists should have known that united states investment in public capital has been down since the late 1960s yet analysis of the u s productivity slowdown completely ignored infrastructure investment for the first fifteen years of this slowdown concentrating instead on energy prices social regulation the composition of the work force research and development different rates of obsolescence of the private capital stock and any number of other matters the public capital stock was hardly ever even mentioned as a potential factor in the productivity slowdown aschauer changed all that he wrote a series of papers 1989a 1989b 1989c that put these two movements together econometrically infrastructure investment turned down and aggregate productivity turned down slightly later both in the united states and in some other developed countries his work hit the magic button those who had worried about the productivity puzzle for fifteen years welcomed a new suspect those who were worried about low rates of u s national saving welcomed a new way to make their argument even more forcefully than with official figures on saving and investment which do not count infrastructure investment as investment political liberals and liberal politicians saw a way to rescue government spending and projects from the assaults of reaganism and even a way to avoid oth

technical efficiency and impact of environmental regulations in farrow to finish swine production in taiwan this article demonstrates how technical efficiency and the impact of environmental regulations of taiwanese farrow to finish swine production can be estimated in the presence of undesirable outputs the issue of measuring technical efficiencies while considering undesirable outputs has been addressed by past studies but the proper method of including undesirable outputs has always been a subject of debate this article develops a data envelopment analysis dea based model that includes undesirable outputs the technologies of desirable output production and undesirable output control are considered simultaneously this allows one to transform undesirable output into desirable output whereby a traditional shephard distance function can be used to measure technical efficiencies an approach to measuring the impacts due to environmental regulations is then derived empirical results show that larger farms are more technically efficient than small sized farms but no clear conclusions can be reached for the measures of regulatory impact among farms with different sizes on average the sample farms incurred an opportunity cost due to environmental regulations equivalent to 9 8 of market value opportunity costs rise with efficiency

biofuels and food security micro evidence from ethiopia abstract there is considerable controversy about the impact of biofuels on food security in developing countries a major concern is that biofuels reduce food security by increasing food prices in this paper we use survey evidence to assess the impact of castor production on poor and food insecure rural households in ethiopia about 1 3 of poor farmers have allocated on average 15 of their land to the production of castor beans under contract in biofuel supply chains castor production significantly improves their food security they have fewer months without food and the amount of food they consume increases castor cultivation is beneficial for participating households food security in several ways by generating cash income from castor contracts they can store food for the lean season castor beans preserve well on the field which allows sales when farmers are in need of cash or food spillover effects of castor contracts increases the productivity of food crops increased food crop productivity offsets the amount of land used for castor so that the total local food supply is not affected

measuring the performance of thermal power firms in china via fuzzy enhanced russell measure model with undesirable outputs abstract thermal power has accounted for the major part of the electricity generation over recent several decades in china it plays an important role in supporting china s economic development while it also brings great pressure to the environment protection because of a large amount of pollution generated during its production in order to solve or alleviate the environmental problem caused by thermal power firms efficiency evaluation is the first important step as thermal power firm is a complex system with multiple inputs and multiple outputs usually including fuzzy data and undesirable outputs in the productions in this paper we build an integrated enhanced russell measure model based on data envelopment analysis for evaluating the performance of decision making units in the presence of the undesirable outputs in fuzzy circumstance then this new model is applied to analyze the environmental performance and provide the benchmarks for the thermal power firms in china which can guide the decision makers to make suitable future production plans for improving their performance

markets technology and environmental regulation price ambivalence of waste paper in germany abstract we examine the price ambivalence of low quality waste paper grades 1 02 and 1 04 on the german market since 1990 the price of these grades is at times positive and at times negative the underlying reason is the combination of three institutional and technical characteristics of the market i as a result of waste management legislation the supply of waste paper is mostly independent of its price and its demand supply is bounded from below by collection and utilization quotas fixed by the regulation on packaging waste enacted in 1991 ii the only alternative to costly disposal of waste paper by dumping or incineration is its use as a secondary resource in the production of new paper as only the paper industry is capable of using waste paper in a productive manner in significant amount iii yet its use as a substitute for primary inputs is technically limited in this article we describe the technical and institutional conditions leading to price ambivalence and discuss the consequences for supply demand and trade of waste paper

land tenure choice in chinese villages the rational versus the political model the rational and political decision models are developed and tested for the land tenure choice in rural china a novelty of the test is to link the collective decision with general relative factor scarcities competing hypotheses are developed for the two models and tested with panel data collected on 83 chinese villages the results show that neither model is strongly rejected although the political model fares slightly better in more sophisticated econometric testing this suggests that popular political participation is emerging in chinese villages implications of this finding to chinese land policy are discussed

economic versus environmental improvement potentials of danish pig farms this article demonstrates how economic and environmental improvement potentials of danish pig farms can be estimated using data envelopment analysis dea to avoid some of the problems associated with the definition of undesirable outputs environmental variables are included as nutrients applied with manure and nutrients removed with the crops these environmental variables are combined with a series of economic variables including the costs of fertilizer furthermore subvector efficiency and a two step analysis are used in order to consider economic and environmental technical efficiency separately the empirical results show considerable improvement potentials especially on the environmental variables sensitivity studies validate that these results are robust to possible uncertainties in the measurement of the environmental variables

an investment analysis for china s sustainable development based on inverse data envelopment analysis abstract in the face of environmental degradation sustainable development has become a common goal across the globe making a scientifically based investment scheme is of great significance to promote the sustainable development of china s economy however there is scarce research related to such an investment scheme of sustainable development this paper proposes a new inverse data envelopment analysis method with undesirable outputs to make several scientifically based investment schemes from different perspectives namely the natural regulation and optimal perspectives by this method decision makers can scientifically forecast the specific amount of investment based on their actual sustainable development objectives which is conducive for reducing the blindness of investment in the future in addition a new ideal perspective is defined to guide a definite direction for improving the level of sustainable development combined with the gray forecasting model gm 1 1 the methods proposed by this paper were then applied to analyze the investment problem for china s sustainable development during the 2015 2024 period the results show that the unbalanced distribution of labor investment and the excessive investment in capital and energy are serious barriers to china s sustainable development in the short term and in the long term the demand for investment in labor and capital will continue to increase along with a lower demand for energy investment and that appropriately strengthening environmental regulations will not affect the overall demand for investment meanwhile improvement directions for improving china s sustainable development are discussed and the results show that most of developing and undeveloped regions in china have great potential for improvement finally some suggestions are proposed in order to create better conditions for china s sustainable development

energy and ghg emission efficiency in the chilean manufacturing industry sectoral and regional analysis by dea and malmquist indexes abstract global warming produced mainly by the emission of greenhouse gases is currently a worldwide concern in the last few decades since the 1950s many of the changes observed in the world climate have been meaningful this paper presents an analysis of energy efficiency and of greenhouse gas emissions in the chilean manufacturing industry by region and sector taking into consideration time sequences data envelopment analysis dea models are used for the analysis three ways to handle undesirable outputs are compared the source of inefficiency in each decision making unit dmu is calculated using scale efficiency and the evolution over time is analyzed using the malmquist index the results indicate that the industries located in the chilean regions of coquimbo la araucania and aysen were the most efficient while the industries in the regions of tarapaca antofagasta and biobio were less efficient the most efficient industrial sectors were those involving communications equipment base metals and clothing the least efficient were those concerned with food and beverages textiles and nonmetallic minerals due to the treatment of the undesirable outputs differences were found in the efficiency indexes obtained by the three models this finding suggests using a model better adapted to the characteristics of the outputs in question and the viability of improving industrial practices

modeling undesirable factors in efficiency evaluation abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of decision making units dmus with multiple performance factors which are grouped into outputs and inputs once the efficient frontier is determined inefficient dmus can improve their performance to reach the efficient frontier by either increasing their current output levels or decreasing their current input levels however both desirable good and undesirable bad factors may be present for example if inefficiency exists in production processes where final products are manufactured with a production of wastes and pollutants the outputs of wastes and pollutants are undesirable and should be reduced to improve the performance using the classification invariance property we show that the standard dea model can be used to improve the performance via increasing the desirable outputs and decreasing the undesirable outputs the method can also be applied to situations when some inputs need to be increased to improve the performance the linearity and convexity of dea are preserved through our proposal

does environmental degradation shackle economic growth a panel data investigation on 11 asian countries sustainable economic growth needs to be the primary objective of every government including developing asian countries to improve the social welfare of the people therefore to achieve the desirable level of sustainable economic growth environmental degradation must be controlled without lowering real growth and the well being of the society this study empirically investigates the impact of environmental degradation by co2 emissions on the economic growth of 11 asian countries between 1990 and 2011 based on the nature of the data traditional panel estimation techniques encompassing fixed effects and random effects are employed in which the results of hausman s test and other tests show that the use of fixed effects is preferable over the random effect estimator empirical results exhibit that environmental degradation has a significantly negative impact on economic growth empirical findings also suggest that environmental degradation should be regulated therefore environmentally enlightened management policies for the decrease of co2 emissions and fuel consumption by transportation and industries need to be pursued by asian countries the adoption of safe carbon emission cut back policies is a promising path to sustainable economic growth

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

environmental regulation and green productivity growth empirical evidence on the porter hypothesis from oecd industrial sectors abstract green growth has become an important development strategy for oecd countries and governments have correspondingly implemented various environmental regulation policies whereas few studies have discussed the impacts of environmental regulation on green productivity growth in oecd countries based on a panel data of oecd countries industrial sectors this study analyzes the stringency of environmental regulation policies and measures green productivity growth using an extended sbm ddf approach the dynamic panel regression investigates the impacts and mechanism of environmental policy stringency on green productivity growth in oecd countries industrial sectors the main results are i porter hypothesis is validated that the environmental policy has a positive impact on green productivity growth within a certain level of stringency lower than 3 08 ii the impact turns to be adverse when the environmental regulation policy is stringent over a certain level as the compliance cost effect is higher than innovation offset effect the findings provide new empirical evidence for the strong version of the porter hypothesis and some implications for oecd countries to further promote green growth

testing between competing models of sharecropping the marshallian approach assumes a prohibitively high cost of monitoring the sharecropper s activities while the monitoring approach argues that landlords stipulate and effectively monitor sharecroppers activities i present new evidence using detailed data collected from eight indian villages most tenants own some land of their own this provides a controlled environment in studying the impact of contractual arrangements the differences in input and output intensities on owned minus sharecropped land of the same household are found to be sizable and significant suggesting a rejection of the monitoring approach and supporting the notion of the marshallian productive inefficiency of sharecropping

impacts of tenancy arrangements on investment and efficiency evidence from pakistan in this article we use farm level data from the punjab province in pakistan to analyze the impact of three tenancy contracts on investment in soil improving and productivity enhancing measures and farm productivity a multivariate tobit model that accounts for potential substitutability and complementarity of investment options as well as endogeneity of tenure arrangements was employed in the empirical analysis our empirical results indicate that land tenure arrangements influence farmers decisions to invest in soil improving and productivity enhancing measures in particular owner cultivators with secured tenancy arrangements were found to be more likely to invest in soil improving and productivity enhancing measures compared to those on leased contracts we also find that output per hectare was highest on land cultivated by owners and lowest on land under sharecropping tenancy lending support to the marshallian inefficiency hypothesis

friends with benefits patronage networks and distributive politics in china abstract existing research on distributive politics mainly focuses on the influence of electoral competition between political parties but less is known about non electoral mechanisms of resource allocation inside a dominant party this study examines how informal patron client networks within the ruling communist party shape the distribution of intergovernmental transfers in china a major one party regime using a new dataset on city level fiscal transfers and a novel method to infer informal political connections through past promotions we show that provincial leaders allocate significantly more transfers to localities governed by officials who are part of their networks this bias persists even when we use a specification that only exploits variations in connection caused by exogenous turnovers of higher level leadership we evaluate two plausible motivations behind this bias network based policy coordination and collective corruption and find evidence in stronger support of the former our findings suggest that private networks may function as an important albeit costly tool of mobilization in one party systems

a conditional directional distance function approach for measuring regional environmental efficiency evidence from uk regions abstract this paper by using conditional directional distance functions as introduced by simar and vanhems j econometrics 166 2012 342 354 modifies the model by fare and grosskopf eur j operat res 157 2004 242 245 and examines the link between regional environmental efficiency and economic growth the proposed model using conditional directional distance functions incorporates the effect of regional economic growth on regions environmental efficiency levels the results from uk regional data reveal a negative relationship between regions gdp per capita and environmental inefficiency up to a certain gdp per capita level after that level it appears that the relationship becomes positive as an overall result the regional environmental inefficiency gdp per capita relationship appears to have a u shape form

traditional vs modern production systems price and nonmarket considerations of cacao producers in northern ecuador many factors besides profit maximization such as nonmarket ecological and social benefits influence smallholder households to adopt a specific agricultural production system or sell in a particular market thus different analytical techniques are needed that take into consideration more than monetary income to fully capture these additional benefits to better understand the production decisions of smallholder farmers we build on previous work on the household model and shadow wage estimation to develop a shadow wage for ecuadorian cacao producers that includes these nonmarket benefits we found that the shadow wage correctly indicated that on average these households would prefer to use an agroforestry production system instead of the more profitable modern system because of the nonmarket benefits received from the former system

two tier land tenure system and sustained economic growth in post 1978 rural china abstract the two tier land tenure system has been widely blamed for the problems in land allocation and in land specific investment observed in the postreform rural china greater privatization of property rights in land has been proposed to enable productive farmers to acquire more land to promote land circulation to improve farmers access to credit and to encourage farm investment it is argued here that in the presence of multiple market distortions land privatization is unlikely to provide a solution to the agricultural problems rather an approach which refines the existing framework of the two tier ownership system offers more promise

efficiency assessment of primary care providers a conditional nonparametric approach this paper uses a fully nonparametric approach to estimate efficiency measures for primary care units incorporating the effect of exogenous environmental factors this methodology allows us to account for different types of variables continuous and discrete describing the main characteristics of patients served by those providers in addition we use an extension of this nonparametric approach to deal with the presence of undesirable outputs in data represented by the rates of hospitalization for ambulatory care sensitive condition acsc the empirical results show that all the exogenous variables considered have a significant and negative effect on efficiency estimates

inter regional insurance this paper considers the problem facing a central government which can insure regional governments by use of intergovernmental grants against region specific and privately observed shocks either to income or demand for or cost of the public good notable results are i depending on the source of the shock the grant may induce over or undersupply of the public good relative to the samuelson rule ii with public good spillovers between regions there is two way distortion of public good supply that is qualitatively different distortions relative to the samuelson rule for different values of the shock iii the solution to the central government s problem may depend qualitatively on whether regional taxation is lump sum or distortionary 1999 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

local public goods inter regional transfers and private information abstract suppose that the centre wishes to make transfers between member states of a federation to reduce inequality however it lacks precise information concerning the cost differences that are responsible for the initial income inequality we examine the implications of asymmetric information for the design of the transfer scheme we show that if member states inherent cost levels as local public good providers take discrete values the first best or complete information transfer scheme may or may not violate incentive compatibility if inherent cost is a continuous random variable such a scheme certainly violates incentive compatibility we also explore the possibility of binding participation constraints in our model a binding incentive compatibility constraint leads to a reduction in effort devoted to cost reduction and a binding participation constraint will also lead to a violation of samuelson s optimality condition for public good provision

rental markets for cultivated land and agricultural investments in china the purpose of this paper is to empirically track the progress and consequences of the emergence of cultivated land markets in china since 2000 we draw on a set of nationwide household level panel data for 2000 and 2008 and find that the markets for cultivated land rental have emerged robustly according to our data 19 of china s cultivated land was rented in farm operators in 2008 we also find that the nature of china s cultivated land rental contracts has become more formal and lengthened the period of time that the tenant is able to cultivate the rented in plots while there may be benefits for lessors and tenants our data show that there are falling rates of investment in organic manure the farmers in our sample have reduced organic manure use from 13 tons ha in 2000 to 5 tons ha in 2008 part of this fall is due to the rise of cultivated land rental markets the analysis however does not find that improved property rights in cultivated land rental affect investment largely because property rights have largely been established by 2000 the first year of our sample our results however also show that there are forces that appear to be mitigating the negative consequences of rising cultivated land rental after holding constant initial rental rates and other factors we find that the gap between investment in organic manure in own land and rented in land is narrowing one interpretation of our findings is that if policymakers can find ways to even further strengthen the rights of lessors and tenants as well as lengthen contract periods farmerseven those that rentwill invest more in their land because they will be able to capture the returns to their investments

the static and dynamic environmental efficiency of renewable energy a malmquist index analysis of oecd countries abstract in recent years renewable energy and environmental efficiency have been interesting issues for both academics and industry actors when discussing sustainable development against this background the present study examines the environmental efficiency of renewable energy from the static and the dynamic perspective in 31 oecd countries a study conducted to understand the impact of renewable energy across countries as a non parametric methodology data envelopment analysis is used to measure environmental efficiency through multiple inputs and outputs labor capital and renewable energy supply are the three inputs while gdp is the desirable output and carbon emissions are the undesirable output to measure the dynamic environmental efficiency of renewable energy the malmquist productivity index is applied to estimate the average efficiency change from 2004 to 2011 the results demonstrate geographical differences in environmental efficiency across the oecd countries in oecd america have the highest average environmental efficiency and those in oecd europe have the largest standard deviation we also find that dynamic efficiency is influenced by the global financial crisis triggered in the united states further we show that oecd countries implement both catch up and frontier shift strategies to improve environmental efficiency

how sustainable are sustainable development programs the case of the sloping land conversion program in china summary this paper undertakes a comprehensive assessment of the long run sustainability of one of the world s largest sustainable development programs the slopping land conversion program slcp in china under different plausible post slcp scenarios the analysis is based on farmer contingent behavior post program land and labor decisions as well as choice experiment data our econometric results highlight the main obstacles to the program s sustainability which include specific shortfalls in program implementation and certain institutional constraints namely tenure insecurity and poor land renting rights the use of a choice experiment also reveals unique evidence on rural households preferences over tenure reform in china

land redistribution tenure insecurity and intensity of production a study of farm households in southern ethiopia this study analyzes the determinants of land tenure insecurity and its impact on intensity of use of purchased farm inputs among households in southern ethiopia seventeen percent of the households stated that they were tenure insecure the feeling of tenure insecurity could be caused by the land redistribution policy in ethiopia where household size has been the main criterion used for land allocation after the land reform in 1975 this would imply that land rich households should be more tenure insecure alternatively the local power structure may be strong enough to counter this and cause the land rich who are also likely to be influential to be able to protect their land rights the analysis revealed that in the overall sample relative farm size was not significantly correlated with tenure insecurity when testing for each site however we found that in four of the sites per capita farm size was positively associated with tenure insecurity while in five other sites it had a significant negative association this may be due to local historical cultural and demographic differences giving way to differences in the effects of the redistribution policy and the local power structure on tenure insecurity we assessed the impact of tenure insecurity on the intensity of use of purchased farm inputs the tenure insecurity variable was insignificant farmers in areas with a positive correlation between farm size and tenure insecurity were more likely to purchase farm inputs larger farms were more likely to use purchased inputs but this effect was lower in areas with a positive correlation between farm size and tenure insecurity poverty and subsistence constraints may explain this absence of higher intensity of use of purchased inputs on small farms by contrast the land redistribution policy may have improved small farms access to purchased farm inputs text of abstract

incentives and optimal size of local jurisdictions abstract a model of optimal territorial decentralization is presented in which smaller local governments have an informational advantage concerning public goods production costs and the central government has imperfect information on spillover effects induced by local projects the attention is focused on the optimal size of local entities and on the shape of transfer schedules from the central government to local jurisdictions the optimal territorial organization is a compromise between small jurisdictions so as to benefit from the geographical proximity effect on information and large entities in which spillover effects are more easily internalized by means of linear or non linear taxation schemes implemented by the centre

efficiency evaluation of chinese regional industrial systems with undesirable factors using a two stage slacks based measure approach abstract the process of a regional industrial system in china can be separated into two internal stages production stage and pollutant abatement stage this paper aims to examine the efficiency of chinese regional industrial systems by taking the operational performance of its two internal stages into consideration unlike traditional data envelopment analysis models that treat decision making units as black box when measuring their efficiencies with undesirable factors this paper proposes a two stage model based on slacks based measure to evaluate the efficiency of chinese regional industrial systems by decomposing the efficiency into production efficiency and abatement efficiency the proposed model can estimate the efficiencies of the whole regional industrial system its production stage and abatement stage simultaneously the model provides a way of improving performance of a regional industrial system through identifying its inefficient internal stages this can help to find out the main sources of the inefficiency that arise from the internal stages within the system which cannot be done by using conventional environmental data envelopment analysis models findings resulting from the model application show that there are great disparities in regional industrial systems efficiencies and the inefficiency of chinese industrial system is largely driven by the abatement stage

incorporating the learning effect into data envelopment analysis to measure msw recycling performance abstract the effect of organizational learning which results in continuous improvement of organizational performance over time has been widely discussed the cumulative learning effect may form as a source of intellectual capital thus far the static data envelopment analysis dea model has not been used to examine the longitudinal learning effect therefore a two stage approach is developed together with the estimation of a latent learning effect using time series data the estimated learning effect is then used as an input in the dea slacks based measure sbm model the proposed dea sbm model can be used to investigate the efficiency of the organizational learning effect of municipal solid waste msw recycling systems this study estimated the cumulative learning effect of 23 local governments in taiwan from 2001 to 2009 using regression analysis the results were incorporated into the dea sbm model to evaluate the relative performance of msw recycling systems in 2009 this work makes three major contributions first this paper developed a new approach that incorporates organizational learning effects into the dea sbm model second improved policies were provided to local governments with inefficient msw recycling systems third this paper found that household disposable income levels influence learning methods leading to a considerable difference in cumulative learning effects in promoting recycling policies local governments should determine whether such policies can be disseminated and implemented given the local community s standard of living

the potential of land rental markets in the process of economic development evidence from china abstract we develop a model of land leasing with agents characterized by unobserved heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off farm labor market in this case decentralized land rental may contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have several advantages over administrative reallocation the extent to which this is true empirically is explored using data from three of china s poorest provinces land rental markets and administrative reallocation reallocate land to those with lower endowments but the former are more effective in doing so and have a bigger productivity enhancing effect information on hypothetical market participation suggests that reducing transaction costs in land rental markets could help to realize significant additional productivity gains

decentralization and public procurement performance new evidence from italy we exploit a new dataset based on european union eu procurement award notices to investigate the relationship between the degree of centralization of public procurement and its performance we focus on the case of italy where all levels of government along with a number of other public institutions are involved in procurement and are subject to the same eu regulation we find that a municipalities and utilities which currently award among the largest shares of contracts achieve lower rebates than other institutional categories and b decentralization implies lower rebates only when it comes with weak competences of procurement officials the evidence seems to suggest that a reorganization of the procurement system both in terms of partial centralization and increased professionalization of procurement officials would help improve award stage procurement performance jel h11 h57 h71 h77

rural household income distribution and inequality in china effects of payments for ecosystem services policies and other factors in the late 1990s china initiated the conversion of croplands to forest program ccfp and the ecological welfare forest program ewfp based on the payments for ecosystem services pes principle positive socioeconomic outcomes of the programs are essential for the long term success of eco environment conservation however there is lack of understanding of their longer term over 10 years impacts on rural livelihoods in this paper we examine income distribution and inequality of rural households under ccfp and ewfp in rural anhui china after 12 years of program implementation results show that ccfp participating households have higher income inequality than non participants while the ewfp does not have an significant effect local off farm work and out migration with remittances are the two principal income sources and both add to inequality a regression based decomposition of inequality shows that the ccfp indirectly alters livelihoods by increasing out migration with remittances but it also adds to inequality from shifting livelihoods to non agricultural activities meanwhile ewfp payments positively affect agricultural incomes and contribute 16 to agricultural income inequality finally human capital natural capital and physical capital all play important roles in generating income and inequality but the factors affecting inequality from agricultural and non agricultural activities are different

technical environmental and eco efficiency measurement for supplier selection an extension and application of data envelopment analysis with increased global awareness of environmental sustainability green supply chain management gscm has received considerable attention in the literature over the decade green supplier selection and assessment in gscm is one of the most significant and complex challenges for supply chain managers this paper provides a new model and approach for green supplier selections by decomposing their efficiency indicators into technical environmental and eco efficiency scores we show that the models in the literature are computationally intensive and are not able to measure eco efficiency properly instead of running three different models linear goal programming is used to integrate technical environmental and eco efficiency objectives into a multiple objective linear programming molp data envelopment analysis dea model therefore the model proposed in this paper is less computationally intensive than the models in the literature the new model provides a more valid eco efficiency indicator of decision making units dmus by utilizing a better combination of the technical and environmental efficiency objectives compared to the conventional models unlike the conventional models the new model identifies dmus as being eco efficient if and only if they are both technically and environmentally efficient we also discuss the non dominated weights as the solutions of the molp model and use them to construct technical environmental and eco cross efficiency matrices of the dmus in order to illustrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed model we present the real world business case of the hyundai steel company and its suppliers

efficiency subsidies and environmental adaptation of animal farming under cap the purpose of this article is to model the interaction between the targets of the current cap environmental adaptation subsidies and efficiency q1 of animal farming to this end we first have to identify the production frontier and relative efficiency level for each animal oriented farm in the sample the production frontier and efficiency index for each type of farm assuming no specific production functions are identified using data envelope analysis dea techniques we then address the relationship between relative efficiency farm size and environmentally friendly behavior by carrying out a nonparametric regression of efficiency on economic size a proxy for the degree of environmental appropriateness and regional dummies calculations of the efficiency of the farms including direct subsidies are compared with the counterfactual exercise in the case in which direct subsidies are not considered finally we look for relations between subsidies and factors such as farm size efficiency and environmentally friendly behavior one key result shows that on average direct payments generally tend to increase efficiency however in most of the cases the mean efficiency decreases as the percentage of direct payments rises direct payments are found to be positively related to environmentally friendly production at least in germany however in general the direct payment system is not sufficient to offset the fact that the less environmentally friendly farms as well as the larger farms are more efficient

a dea approach for estimating the agricultural energy and environmental efficiency of eu countries this study attempts to evaluate the energy and environmental efficiency of the primary sectors of the eu member state countries the evaluation is based on a non radial data envelopment analysis dea model which allows for non proportional adjustments to energy inputs and undesirable outputs and thus it provides different estimations for energy and environmental efficiency scores the 2001 2008 time period was selected for this research one of the most important findings is that countries like germany sweden or austria with strong environmental protection standards appear to be less energy and environmentally efficient compared with countries like denmark belgium spain france or ireland in addition a series of eastern european countries achieve low efficiency scores which can be characterized as expectable due to low technology level being implemented in the primary production process there are also two sub periods for this research the first one 2001 2006 covers the fully coupled with specific cultivations period for subsidy administation and the second 2007 2008 where the new decoupled subsidy scheme was implemented there are significant hints for considerable changes of energy and environmental efficiency after the implementation of the the new cap with the new member states siginificantly differ of both energy and environmental efficiency copmared with the older ones

rational inefficiency adjustment costs and sequential technologies abstract in this paper we propose a novel approach to estimate the rational inefficiency of decision making units in the presence of adjustment costs using sequential definitions of the production technology we show how cost inefficiency can be decomposed into rational and residual inefficiency as well as inefficiency caused by technical change furthermore we estimate lower bounds for the unobserved adjustment costs based on unexploited cost reductions due to rational inefficiency these adjustment costs are used to evaluate the feasibility of exploiting cost reductions caused by residual inefficiency we demonstrate the empirical applicability of our model by estimating and decomposing the cost inefficiency of u s coal fired power plants using panel data which cover the period between 1994 and 2009

population economic growth and regional environmental inefficiency evidence from u s states we apply a conditional directional distance function allowing multiple exogenous factors to measure environmental performance we evaluate the air pollution performance levels of u s states for the years 1998 and 2008 states environmental inefficiency is determined by population size and gdp per capita gdppc the overall results reveal that there is much variation in environmental inefficiencies among the u s states a second stage nonparametric analysis indicates a nonlinear relationship between states population size gdppc levels and states environmental inefficiency levels our results indicate that environmental inefficiency on the whole decreases with increased population and income per capita but there are limits to this improvement and at high income and population levels the tendency may reverse

moving off the farm land institutions to facilitate structural transformation and agricultural productivity growth in china agriculture has made major contributions to china s economic growth and poverty reduction but the literature has rarely focused on the institutional factors that might underpin such structural transformation and productivity this paper aims to fill that gap drawing on an 8 year panel of 1 200 households in six key provinces it explores the impact of government land reallocations and formal land use certificates on agricultural productivity growth as well as the likelihood of households to exit from agriculture or send family members to the non farm sector it finds that land tenure insecurity measured by the history of past land reallocations discourages households from quitting agriculture the recognition of land rights through formal certificates encourages the temporary migration of rural labor both factors have a large impact on productivity at about 30 percent each mainly by encouraging market based land transfers a sustained increase in non agricultural opportunities will likely reinforce the importance of secure land tenure which is a precondition for successful structural transformation and continued economic attractiveness of rural areas

induced institutional change or transaction costs the economic logic of land reallocations in chinese agriculture abstract the communal land rights system in china which combines individualised farming with periodic land reallocations provides a good case for testing the economic logic of land reallocations analysis of the results of a unique village survey reveals that a village s choice of land reallocation type partial or large in scale is significantly affected by transaction cost considerations which vary according to village topography and size rather than concerns for economic efficiency tenure security the latter of which is a proxy for the theory of induced institutional change more specifically villages with complex topographies tend to favour partial land reallocation whereas larger settlements tend to reallocate land more thoroughly