productivity economies and efficiency in u s agriculture a look at contracts the growing importance of production contracts especially for some livestock species and in certain regions suggests that contracts confer economic benefits on farmers this trend has however stimulated concerns about the impacts of contracting on farm structure and concentration and environmental degradation which have led to efforts by various levels of government to regulate contract production for example in the u s hog industry between 1992 and 1998 the portion of feeder pigto finish hog operations using production contracts increased from 11 to 34 while the share of output produced under contract increased from 22 to 63 key and mcbride mcbride and key recent growth in hog contracts have been particularly noteworthy in the upper midwest with 2002 contracted production accounting for 47 of the value of total farm production in iowa and minnesota compared to only about 5 in 1996 and virtually none in 1991 meanwhile production contract levels in north carolina the other center of hog production have been relatively stable production contracts offer several potential advantages over independent production that could explain their increasing prevalence such as lowering income risk for growers contracting may also raise farm productivity by improving the quality of managerial inputs speeding the transfer of technical information to growers and facilitating growers access to credit thereby permitting the adoption of newer more efficient technologies at the same time

does trade liberalization promote regional disparities evidence from a multiregional cge model of india summary over last few decades there has been a growing interest among researchers in understanding the link between trade liberalization and regional disparities within the context of an individual country in this study we develop the first ever single country multiregional computable general equilibrium cge model for the indian economy to investigate this linkage overall our results suggest that in the short run trade liberalization has a beneficial impact on the rich and fast growing middle income states and a marginal or negative impact on the poor states

the economic costs of environmental regulation in u s dairy farming a directional distance function approach analyses of the costs of regulating greenhouse gas emissions from dairy production which could be used to assess the effectiveness of alternative policy measures is a missing link in the literature this article addresses this gap by establishing the economic impact associated with a hypothetical greenhouse gas environmental regulatory regime across major dairy producing counties in the united states in doing so the article makes three important contributions to the literature first it develops a comprehensive pollution index based on environmental protection agency methodologies which contrasts with previous studies that rely on partial measures based only on surplus nitrogen stemming from the over application of fertilizer second the article uses a directional output distance function an approach that has not been employed previously to evaluate polluting technologies in the u s dairy sector third the article incorporates a four way error approach that accounts for unobserved county heterogeneity time invariant persistent technical efficiency time varying transient technical efficiency and a random error the results indicate that regulating greenhouse gas emissions from dairy farming would induce a 5 percentage point increase in average technical efficiency in addition the economic costs of implementing this hypothetical regulatory framework exhibit significant spatial variation across counties in the united states

comparing malmquist and hicks moorsteen productivity indices exploring the impact of unbalanced vs balanced panel data abstract we explore the effect of balancing unbalanced panel data when estimating primal productivity indices using non parametric frontier estimators first we list a series of pseudo solutions aimed at making an unbalanced panel balanced then we discuss some intermediate solutions e g balancing 2 years by 2 years furthermore we link this problem with a variety of literatures on infeasibilities statistical inference of non parametric frontier estimators and the index theory literature focusing on the dynamics of entry and exit in industries we then empirically illustrate these issues comparing both malmquist and hicks moorsteen productivity indices on two data sets in particular we test for the differences in distribution when comparing balanced and unbalanced results for a given index and when comparing malmquist and hicks moorsteen productivity indices for a given type of data set the latter tests are crucial in answering the question to which extent the malmquist index can approximate the hicks moorsteen index that has a total factor productivity tfp interpretation finally we draw up a list of remaining issues that could benefit from further exploration

nonparametric estimates of the components of productivity and profitability change in u s agriculture recent theoretical advances in total factor productivity tfp measurement mean that tfp indexes can now be exhaustively decomposed into unambiguous measures of technical change and efficiency change to date all applications of this new methodology have involved decomposing indexes that have poor theoretical properties this article shows how the methodology can be used to decompose a new tfp index that satisfies all economically relevant axioms from index theory the application is to state level data from 1960 to 2004 in most states the main drivers of agricultural tfp change are found to have been technical change and scale and mix efficiency change

climate change health care access and regional influence on components of u s agricultural productivity this article examines factors driving three components of total factor productivity change tfpc in u s agriculture technical change tc technical efficiency change tec and scale and mix e

a parametric estimation of total factor productivity and its components in u s agriculture the present study aims at improving our understanding of the individual contribution of the components of total factor productivity tfp change to u s agricultural productivity a novel sequential primal dual estimation routine to calculate tfp change is proposed using a multi output input distance function in the first stage followed by a cost minimization routine in the second stage tfp change is estimated as the direct sum of the estimates of technical change technical efficiency change allocative efficiency change input price effects changes in output markup and changes in returns to scale in each state the validity of the proposed methodology is supported by the remarkable overlap and high correlation of our annual estimates of tfp change with the usda s measures of change in tfp by state although technical change tends to be the largest contributor to productivity change it bears a low and statistically insignificant correlation with tfp change on an annual basis whereas annual changes in the markup effect and returns to scale are highly and significantly correlated with tfp changes this is the first study to find a slowdown of technical progress in the u s farm sector in the 1990s and 2000s and technical regress during the farm crisis of the 1980s while technical efficiency shows a positive overall trend allocative efficiency shows a negative overall trend and their combined effect i e the overall cost efficiency slows down tfp growth the policy recommendations from previous studies on the drivers of tfp should be revised in light of these findings

post war productivity patterns in u s agriculture influences of aggregation procedures in a state level analysis annual data for forty eight states are used to account for changes in the composition of input and output aggregates over space and time and thereby to obtain new evidence on changes in inputs outputs and productivity in u s agriculture the measures change significantly when we use state specific rather than national prices and when we allow for changes in the composition of the aggregates especially of labor and capital inputs we compare our estimates and those reported by ball et al american journal of agricultural economics 81 1999 164 79 the national estimates are similar but substantial differences are found in state level productivity growth

the diffusion of inclusion an open polity model of ethnic power sharing while there is a growing consensus that ethnic inclusion produces peace less is known about what causes transitions to power sharing between ethnic groups in central governments in multiethnic states the few studies that have addressed this question have proposed explanations stressing exclusively domestic factors yet power sharing is spatially clustered which suggests that diffusion may be at play inspired by studies of democratic diffusion we study the spread of inclusive policies with an open polity model that explicitly traces diffusion from inclusion in other states our findings indicate that the relevant diffusion processes operate primarily at the level of world regions rather than globally or between territorial neighbors thus the more inclusive the region the more likely a shift to power sharing becomes shifts away from inclusion to dominance are less common since world war ii but they are more likely in regional settings characterized by ethnic exclusion

estimating input mix efficiency in a parametric framework application to state level agricultural data for the united states this paper contributes to the productivity literature by demonstrating novel econometric methods to estimate input mix efficiency ime in a parametric framework input mix efficiency is defined as

agricultural productivity revisited this paper describes production accounts for agriculture output is defined as gross production leaving the farm as opposed to real value added inputs are not limited to capital and labor but include intermediate inputs as well we derive index numbers of gross output capital labor and intermediate inputs these data are used to construct indexes of total factor productivity we then compare the contributions of input growth and productivity growth to economic growth the important role of productivity growth in agriculture becomes immediately apparent

why european banks are less profitable than u s banks a decomposition approach abstract the low profitability of european banks relative to their u s counterparts has recently raised concerns among policy makers and researchers this paper attempts to shed light on this issue by using the o donnell 2012 decomposition approach this approach enables us to decompose the relative profitability of european banks into an output input price index and a total factor productivity index with the former further decomposed into two price indexes and the latter further into four productivity and efficiency measures our results show that european banks profitability was not only weak but also deteriorated over time our further analysis shows that the decline in the output input price index was due to declines in relative lending rate and relative return on securities and an increase in funding costs while the decline in the productivity index was driven by declines in technical efficiency scale efficiency and residual mix efficiency

decomposing the luenberger hicks moorsteen total factor productivity indicator an application to u s agriculture abstract this paper introduces a decomposition of the additively complete luenberger hicks moorsteen total factor productivity indicator into the usual components technical change technical inefficiency change and scale inefficiency change our approach is general in that it does not require differentiability or convexity of the production technology using a nonparametric framework the empirical application focuses on the agricultural sector at the state level in the u s over the period 1960 2004 the results show that luenberger hicks moorsteen productivity increased substantially in the considered period this productivity growth is due to output growth rather than input decline although the extent depends on the convexity assumption of the technology technical change is the main driver while the role of technical inefficiency change and scale inefficiency change also depends on the convexity assumption of the technology

analyzing components of productivity growth using the bennet lowe indicator an application to welsh sheep farms this article introduces the bennet lowe total factor productivity tfp indicator the proposed measure is difference based additively complete and transitive we also develop a general nonparametric framework to exhaustively decompose all bennet type tfp indicators including the one introduced here into technical change technical efficiency change scale efficiency change and mix efficiency change this decomposition provides a powerful tool for policy makers to guide financial decisions on research and development extension subsidies and price support the empirical application focuses on the welsh sheep sector for the years 2001 2014 the results show that in this 14 year period welsh sheep farms increased their tfp by 30 28 on average 2 33 p a however the exhaustive decomposition shows that tfp growth is not distributed equally across all farms with an increasing divergence between front runners and laggards the negative values of scale efficiency change and mix efficiency change cast doubt on the current subsidy policies

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

productivity and efficiency of vietnamese banking system new evidence using fare primont index analysis this article aims to provide a clearer view on the recent evolutions of the vietnamese banking system that can be useful to public authority when taking restructuring decisions this article focuses on the evolution of productivity of vietnamese banks over the period 2008 to 2012 and on the evolution of the different components of this productivity technical change pure technical efficiency and mix and scale efficiency the methodology draws from very recent developments in index theory in the design of multiplicative complete economically ideal indexes using fare primont productivity indexes to measure productivity this methodology is applied to a balanced panel of vietnamese banks the results complement observations usually made on the recent development of the vietnamese banking system they show that the state bank of vietnam s restructuring policy cannot focus only on either the insufficient size of banks or a better management of these banks in terms of the mix of outputs both must be conside

decomposing productivity indexes into explanatory factors abstract productivity measures are increasingly regarded as key indicators of economic performance identifying sources of productivity growth is of interest to both firms and policy makers this paper revisits the debate on how to decompose productivity growth into explanatory factors with a focus on extracting technical progress technical efficiency change and returns to scale components using bjurek s concept of the malmquist index introduced into production theory in a systematic way by caves christensen and diewert a reference technology is required to define the components of interest unlike other approaches ours do not make any convexity assumptions on the reference technology but instead follows the example of tulkens and his coauthors in assuming that the reference technology satisfies free disposability assumptions a new decomposition of a productivity index is provided with the existence and properties of the underlying distance functions of the decomposition proven under relatively unrestrictive assumptions the paper also provides for the first time a theoretical justification for the geometric average form of the bjurek productivity index these rigorous theoretical contributions provide significant avenues for enhanced understanding of empirical productivity performance

make trade not war this paper analyses theoretically and empirically the relationship between military conflicts and trade we show that the conventional wisdom that trade promotes peace is only partially true even in a model where trade is economically beneficial military conflicts reduce trade and leaders are rational when war can occur because of the presence of asymmetric information the probability of escalation is lower for countries that trade more bilaterally because of the opportunity cost associated with the loss of trade gains however countries more open to global trade have a higher probability of war because multilateral trade openness decreases bilateral dependence to any given country and the cost of a bilateral conflict we test our predictions on a large data set of military conflicts on the 1950 2000 period using different strategies to solve the endogeneity issues including instrumental variables we find robust evidence for the contrasting effects of bilateral and multilateral trade openness for proximate countries we find that trade has had a surprisingly large effect on their probability of military conflict

a translog cost function analysis of u s agriculture 1939 77 over the past four decades major changes have occurred in u s agriculture a new era in agricultural production in the united states began in 1939 world war ii gave a boost to agriculture still bogged in the depression productivity increases over the period 1939 77 have been quite impressive measured crudely by the ratio of the indices of output and input the productivity index 1967 100 increased from 59 in 1939 to 119 in 1977 to study this phenomenon a multi input translog cost function incorporating hicks neutral technical change hntc was specified annual timeseries data for the united states was used to estimate the model neoclassical duality theory provides an approach for computing the pairwise elasticities of substitution between inputs for each year as well as the annual own and cross price elasticities of demand for inputs

input demands and inefficiency in u s agriculture markov chain monte carlo mcmc methods are used to estimate a seemingly unrelated regression sur system of input demand functions for u s agriculture our demand functions have flexible forms and allow for nonrandom technical inefficiency concavity constraints are imposed at individual data points and the distributions of measures of relative technical efficiency are constrained to the unit interval results are evaluated in terms of characteristics of the posterior distributions of parameters measures of relative technical efficiency and other nonlinear functions of the parameters

theoretical production restrictions and agricultural technology in the united states agricultural production studies are usually conducted using classical econometrics that make it difficult if not impossible to impose conditions derived from economic theory on flexible functional forms therefore such conditions need not hold in estimation we apply bayesian econometrics to estimate a flexible production function using u s agricultural data under alternative restrictions dictated by theory including a fully theoretically consistent model that satisfies all restrictions at each point of the data the probability density functions of parameters output elasticities scale elasticity and productivity gains vary substantially across models output elasticities from the fully theoretically consistent model suggest that agricultural production in the united states has typically been more responsive to land than to other factors of production however output became more responsive over time to changes in materials and less responsive to changes in land and labor by the early 2000s the elasticity of output to materials was very similar to the elasticity of output to land the elasticity of output to capital remained relatively stable over the entire sample the estimates from the fully theoretically consistent model also show a slight increase in the average rate of productivity gains between the 1960s and the 1970s a relative slowdown in the 1980s and 1990s and a relative stabilization afterwards all inputs are substitutes in production all the elasticities of substitution have increased through the decades though at different rates

human rights geostrategy and eu foreign policy 1989 2008 is foreign policy influenced by humanitarian concern or are concepts such as human security merely rhetoric for traditional power politics in this paper i systematically explore whether military

productivity technical efficiency and technological change in french agriculture during 2002 2015 a fare primont index decomposition using group frontiers and meta frontier the objective of the article is to assess productivity change in french agriculture during 2002 2015 namely total factor productivity tfp change and its components technological change and ef