inferring the incidence of industry inefficiency from dea estimates abstract data envelopment analysis dea is among the most popular empirical tools for measuring cost and productive efficiency within an industry because dea is a linear programming technique establishing formal statistical properties for outcomes is difficult we model the incidence of inefficiency within a population of decision making units dmus as a latent variable with dea outcomes providing only noisy and generally inaccurate sample based categorizations of inefficiency we then use a bayesian approach to infer an appropriate posterior distribution for the incidence of inefficiency within an industry based on a random sample of dea outcomes and a prior distribution on that incidence the approach applies to the empirically relevant case of a finite number of firms and to sampling dmus without replacement it also accounts for potential mismeasurement in the dea characterization of inefficiency within a coherent bayesian approach to the problem using three different types of specialty physician practices we provide an empirical illustration demonstrating that this approach provides appropriately adjusted inferences regarding the incidence of inefficiency within an industry

determination of the international maize price what is the growing role of brazil and ukraine this paper examines the relationships among maize prices for four countries to determine if newly emerging exporters brazil and ukraine influence the international price of maize our work focuses on each market s participation in the price discovery process rather than trying to determine a price leader we find that the united states plays the largest role in price discovery followed by argentina brazil and ukraine we also search for export thresholds and find that ukraine s contribution to price discovery rises slightly when an export threshold of 2 3 million tons is reached no export thresholds were found for brazil export thresholds for argentina were found but only have a minor impact on price relationships we also found that price relationships vary considerably across seasons of the year

testing oligopoly power in domestic and export markets empirical applications of testing oligopoly power in different industries are based on the new empirical industrial organization neio approach parallel to this approach theoretical and empirical applications to testing oligopoly power in international trade have also emerged a shortcoming of these approaches is that they do not account for the possibility that an industry which is active in the domestic and international markets may exhibit oligopoly power in both markets we extend the existing models by simultaneously accounting for domestic and international components of four industries in testing for oligopoly power we found that in some cases industries exhibit oligopoly behaviour in either or both markets

china s membership in the world trade organization wto and the exports of the developing economies of east asia a computable general equilibrium approach there is a general perception particularly among the developing countries of east asia that china s wto membership would spell bad news for their exports the asean countries in particular are quite concerned about its likely negative impact on their export and growth potentials in this light the main objective of this paper is to empirically assess the trade implications of china s wto membership for these countries only few studies using a computable general equilibrium cge approach have addressed the issue of china s wto membership trade implications further these studies have not adequately addressed the issue from the perspective of the developing countries of east asia particularly the asean countries using the latest version of the global trade analysis project gtap model and based on the latest tariff reduction commitments by china the results showed that contrary to the current perception and previous studies almost all of the developing countries of east asia are likely to benefi

the welfare implications of trade liberalisation between the southern mediterranean and the eu the impact on the southern mediterranean countries smc of the current process of trade liberalization with the european union is explored the methodology is that of computable general equilibrium modelling under imperfect competition and the model includes ten countries and 11 sectors this allows for both a cross country and cross sectoral analysis of the results the experiments considered are the full liberalization of tariffs as well as changes in market access and trade induced changes in productivity a key feature of the paper is that the phased introduction of tariff reductions is allowed for as explicitly envisaged in the agreements the results show that the process of liberalization may have a substantial though non monotonic impact on the smc economies in terms of both changes in production and through this on welfare the welfare impact is potentially very high in particular for the high tariff economies the sources of the welfare gain tend to derive from perfectly competitive explanat

measuring market power in multi product oligopolies the us meat industry this paper develops and estimates an economic model for measuring market power in a quantity setting oligopoly engaged in the joint production of demand related goods the model which allows for firms conjectures about both same and cross market responses to own output variation is applied to the us meat beef and pork industry he hypothesis that the industry s equilibrium reflects price taking behaviour is rejected the hypothesis of no cross effects cannot be rejected roughly half of the farm to retail price spreads for beef and pork appear to be attributable to market power

how does exchange rate policy affect manufactured exports in mena countries this paper shows that during the 1970s and 1980s mena economies were characterized by a significant overvaluation of their currency this overvaluation has had a cost in terms of competitiveness to determine the degree of overvaluation of the mena currencies an indicator of misalignment was developed based on the estimation of an equilibrium exchange rate edwards exchange rate misalignment in developing countries the johns hopkins university press baltimore 1988 the empirical work was based on a panel of 53 developing countries ten of which are mena economies although overvaluation decreased in the 1990s probably due to flexibilization of the exchange rate regime in some mena countries and to better macroeconomic management in others misalignment remained higher than in other regions this may be explained by the mena countries delay in adopting more flexible exchange rates as well as in reforming their economies in terms of competitiveness the estimation of an export equation has shown

demand estimation in the presence of stochastic trend and seasonality the case of meat demand in the united kingdom if budget shares have stochastic trend or seasonality or both then demand equations based on the assumption of deterministic trend and deterministic seasonality will be mis specified we test this proposition by estimating a linearized almost ideal lai demand system for meat demand in the united kingdom using harvey s structural time series methodology we demonstrate that the model specification allowing for stochastic trend and deterministic seasonality performs best in terms of diagnostic tests and goodness of fit measures it is also shown that the model with stochastic trend is better at out of sample forecasting

oligopoly competition and welfare some recent developments in this essay we wish to highlight three particular areas in the enormous literature on oligopoly where we believe recent work has proved particularly productive and illuminating one recent development of interest has been the application of game theory to the well known interdependence of expectations problem while interesting in its own right it has also had a major impact in clarifying thinking about rational strategic choice and the role of information in affecting outcomes our view is that the information structure of the oligopoly problem plays a crucial role in conditioning the nature of its solution and this is the first topic that we propose to discuss these developments in theory have occurred in tandem with and indeed have stimulated empirical work one important empirical problem is that of identifying the exercise of monopoly power in practice and recent work has focussed on the problem of inferring conduct from observed price output configurations this obviously has a high order of policy importance and it constitutes the second topic in our discussion

testing and incorporating seasonal structures into demand models for fruit it is widely recognized that purchases of perishable agricultural products are affected by the seasonal cycles of production when there are seasonal effects where seasonal buying is not explained by prices alone the seasonal component can be captured using appropriate dummy variables in a demand model however over time the introduction of different varieties and foreign sources of supply in the market may affect the seasonal structure in unknown ways and because of this it becomes important to identify and test for characteristics of seasonal structure in demand models in this article we set out to measure and test the various characteristics of the seasonal component of fruit demand we model seasonality in the context of an almost ideal demand system aids model where we consider several types of fruit demand in the united states

the creation of dominant firm market power in the coconut oil export market legal and institutional changes that centralized control of the philippine coconut oil refining and exporting industries enabled the philippines to exercise some of its potential dominant firm market power if the elasticity of demand for coconut oil continues to increase in part due to concerns about the health risks from eating saturated fats philippine exports will increase slightly while the price and philippine revenue will fall significantly within the next decade

the validity of the elg hypothesis in the mena region cointegration and error correction model analysis the export led growth elg hypothesis is examined for nine middle east and north africa mena countries in three variable vector autoregressive and error correction models when considering total exports the results reject the elg hypothesis in almost all of these countries when only manufactured exports are examined no support is found for elg in countries with relatively low shares of manufactured exports in total merchandise exports but strong support in countries with relatively high shares these findings suggest that promoting exports may contribute to economic growth only after a certain threshold of manufactured exports has been reached

primary energy and greenhouse gases embodied in australian final consumption an input output analysis input output modeling of primary energy and greenhouse gas embodiments in goods and services is a useful technique for designing greenhouse gas abatement policies the present paper describes direct and indirect primary energy and greenhouse gas requirements for a given set of australian final consumption it considers sectoral disparities in energy prices capital formation and international trade flows and it accounts for embodiments in the gross national expenditure as well as the gross domestic product primary energy and greenhouse gas intensities in terms of mj and kg co2 e are reported as well as national balances of primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions

production optimization considering environmental performance and preference in the cap and trade system abstract many countries like china are in a dilemma between economic growth and environmental deterioration e g smog weather simultaneously a growing people concern the product s environmental performance along with their improving environment awareness this paper focuses on the impacts of carbon footprint and low carbon preference on the production decision of emission dependent firms in the cap and trade system the cap and trade system uses the total cap to attain environmental goals and allows trade to achieve the effective scheduling through market regulation under this mechanism through analyzing the influence of carbon footprint and low carbon preference on the market supply and demand we build a production optimization model and develop the optimal decisions several interesting management insights on environmental preference and policy are concluded

revisiting china africa trade from an environmental perspective international trade patterns can be seen as ways to redistribute natural resources and manufactured products by means of convergence and divergence pathways in support of production and consumption processes worldwide by making needed resources to potential users individuals and economies trade acts as a driver of resource extraction processing degradation especially if this is facilitated by market dynamics in which prices are determined by contingent factors that have no links to the environmental dynamics of resource generation and do not match the real quality of natural capital and ecosystems services involved a fair trade relationship should take these aspects into proper account in so promoting additional criteria for resource value and as a consequence towards efficient resource use and cleaner production processes a comprehensive cost and benefit evaluation to consider the economic and ecological impacts is therefore a much needed prerequisite for a balanced trade relationship to conduct this evaluation we firstly choose the trade data of china with south africa sudan algeria nigeria egypt and morocco in the years 2001 2004 2008 and 2012 as sample set then we apply the emergy accounting approach to the international trade dynamic between china and above selected african countries to quantify the exchange of natural capital and ecosystem services among partners including resources that support know how and technology exchange as well as to identify benefits and compensation measures that may increase trade balance and equity via the prevention of uncompensated resource exploitation by accounting for the environmental support embodied in traded resources and their capability to support an economic process the emergy approach applied in this study provides a complementary tool to economic evaluation which enables a more comprehensive understanding of trade beyond the monetary terms of trade in terms of the total emergy exchange the investigated african countries with the exception of south africa and sudan receive more emergy from china over the investigated period which appears to suggest a reversal of the typical trend in which industrialized economies exploit african countries and return small or no benefit to their economies however the composition of the emergy trade indicates that china s import from africa is mainly composed of primary products whereas manufactured products dominate its export this composition is likely to promote the chinese economy supporting resource processing and jobs as well as increase the lifestyle of the wealthy fractions of the african population as a result of increased access to consumer goods however in turn it may contribute to heavier pollution in china and certainly does not favor the development of local industry in africa thus more balanced import and export relations and trade structure that simultaneously involves human and natural capital will be helpful to construct a cooperative relationship

demand for beef and chicken products separability and structural change several studies have indicated that the recent shift from beef to poultry in consumption is not entirely caused by changes in rela tive prices or income braschler chavas dahlgran hudson and vertin moschini and meilke frank thurman most studies of structural change have focused on red meat consumption only thurman has looked closely at the poultry market and no one has considered poultry products yet the mix of chicken products marketed changed dramat ically during the last twenty years and should have influenced aggregate meat demand the share of broiler slaughter marketed as whole birds declined from 74 in 1965 to 28 in 1985 while cut up parts and processed chick en products increased from 26 to 72 whole birds are inferior goods and cut up parts and processed chicken are normal goods haidacher et al the shift in chicken prod uct mix away from whole birds should have increased the preference for total chicken in this article two related questions are ad dressed first do consumers allocate expendi tures among meats by animal origin or by product type second does disaggregation of meat into products in a meat demand model give insight into the causes of structural

emergy network analysis of chinese sectoral ecological sustainability abstract ecological sustainability of the chinese economy is vital for china as well as for the world by integrating environmental input output analysis emergy theory and a complex network model into one framework this paper explores chinese sectoral ecological sustainability with the most recent 2012 input output table the results show that there are significant differences in emergy intensities among sectors the non metal mining sector is the most emergy intensive sector at 6 06e 17 sej 10000 yuan followed by the metal mining sector additionally output connections have a positive impact on the emergy yield ratio input connections exert a negative impact on the emergy yield ratio and pagerank centrality has a positive effect on the environmental loading ratio this paper updates the chinese sectoral emergy assessment identifies key sectors in the chinese ecological network and analyzes the impact of network indicators on sectoral emergy performance these analyses will be useful in updating the guide for adjusting industrial structure in china

oligopoly power in the food and tobacco industries in this article we estimate and test for the degree of oligopoly power and economies of scale in forty food and tobacco industries using the new empirical industrial organization neio framework and four digit sic data lerner indices and elasticities of scale are compared throughout the entire food and tobacco industries t tests verify that all but three of these industries exert statistically significant degrees of oligopoly power and that over 82 of these industries exhibit nonconstant returns to scale the empirical results also provide estimates of the price elasticities of demand for each industry

entry barriers and multiproduct oligopolies do they forebear or spoil abstract we provide a flexible method to test for a variety of multiproduct oligopolistic models and to estimate the relevance of entry conditions on industrial conduct we find that for the case of the uruguayan banking sector during the late 1970s multiproduct oligopolistic interactions were present however the partial relaxation of legal entry barriers substantially removed the multiproduct nature of these interactions

emergy based resource intensities of industry sectors in china abstract emergy analysis can facilitate unified system resources accounting by combining emergy method with input output modeling technology this paper developed an eco thermodynamic input output model of the 2007 china economy to account for the sector specific resource intensities the results show that the resource intensities for chinese industry sectors present a distribution with a certain pattern which may vary over three orders of magnitude measured in terms of resource consumption against economic capital generation at the scale of the entire economy the emergy intensities for the resource extraction sectors of non metallic minerals and metallic ores are the highest sectors with the smallest emergy to money ratios are service sectors which rely less on primary natural resources the sector of coal mining is found to have the largest resource intensity of 6 19e 16 sej 1e 4 cny among all sectors while the sectoral intensity of scrap and waste is only 6 44e 14 sej 1e 4 cny the least one the insight obtained by juxtaposing resource intensities as well as their structures of industry sectors is useful to identify opportunities for reducing resource intensities that could enable improvements in their ecological sustainability

the influence of energy efficiency on other natural resources use an input output perspective abstract energy efficiency improvements reduce the costs of energy services and under some circumstances increase the available income this generates an additional increase of consumption of goods and services that need additional energy to be produced distributed and consumed this effect is known as the indirect rebound effect in the literature however beyond this additional increase of global energy consumption there is also a variation of the use of other natural resources due to the same mechanism this effect which we label as direct and indirect cross rebound effect is generally not considered by academia nor policy making when designing and implementing energy policies this research conceptualizes this effect develops a methodology for its estimation and provides estimates for the spanish economy results show that an energy efficiency in households could increase the use of minerals and water while reducing the use of energy fossil fuels and metal ores in spain these reductions however are lower than the expected ones from an input output perspective leading to positive direct and indirect cross rebound effects between 64 6 and 74 7 for energy equivalent to direct and indirect rebound effect 48 63 for fossil fuels 84 89 for metal ores backfire for non metallic minerals 147 134 and extreme backfire for water 1191 1628

periodic cointegration representation and inference textabstractthis paper considers a new approach to the analysis of stable relationships between nonstationary seasonal time series the basis of this approach is an error correction model in which both long run effects and adjustment parameters are allowed to vary per season first we discuss theoretical arguments for such a periodic error correction model we define periodic cointegration and compare this to the concept of seasonal cointegration next we analyze statistical inference in the periodic error correction model a sequential procedure is proposed consisting of a test for periodic cointegration an estimator of the cointegration parameters and adjustment coefficients and a class of tests for the hypothesis that some of the parameters are constant over the seasons the finite sample behavior of the proposed test statistics is analyzed in a limited monte carlo exercise we conclude the paper with an application to a model of aggregate swedish consumption

seasonal oligopoly power the case of the us fresh fruit market what has been ignored in much of the existing studies of oligopoly power is that market behaviour need not be static in nature and oligopoly power in agriculture need not be present in every month of the year in a market which is characterized by seasonality and supplied by different sources during different seasons it is quite possible to observe oligopoly power during different months of the year in this paper a method for estimating and testing for seasonal changes in the degree of oligopoly power is introduced it was found that in the pear market oligopoly power coefficients remain low throughout the year on the other hand the grape market is characterized by higher oligopoly power coefficients and considerable season variations

manufacturing exports mining exports and growth cointegration and causality analysis for chile 1960 2001 this study examines the export led growth hypothesis using annual time series data from chile in a production function framework it addresses the problem of specification bias under which previous studies have suffered and focuses on the impact of manufactured and mining exports on productivity growth in order to investigate if and how manufactured and mining exports affect economic growth via increases in productivity the study uses johansen cointegration technique the estimation results can be interpreted as evidence of productivity enhancing effects of manufactured exports and of productivity limiting effects of mining exports

middle east and north africa countries agricultural export potentials under trade reforms middle east and north africa mena countries future stand in the world s economy depends to a large extent on the potentials of their agriculture to perform in a free trade world european union eu is the largest market for agricultural products of mena countries though new outlets and new partnerships can expand the market of their products enhancing agriculture s potentials safeguards the economy s general expansion and impede the flee of mena countries huge labour reserves to the developed world in this work introducing a few possible trade reforms a general equilibrium model is employed to assess the impacts upon region s export potentials and welfare changes selecting certain distinct scenarios from a wide spectrum of anticipated trade reforms and feeding them into the model insights on the direction of the expected changes and rough estimates of accrued benefits can be extracted the model results suggest that the region might benefit the most under special provisions for developing cou

imperfect competition in multiproduct food industries with application to pear processing agricultural product markets often involve relatively few firms processing a farm product into multiple processed products this market structure prompts concern that processing firms may exercise both oligopsony and oligopoly power the present paper develops and applies a methodology to test simultaneously for market power in both the raw input market and multiple processed output markets application of the methodology to california pear processing indicates the industry has exerted power in both its farm input market and the markets for canned pears and fruit cocktail

seasonality and unit roots the demand for fruits abstract we apply seasonal unit root tests to apple and pear price and quantity data we then develop a method for testing shifts in amplitude and or phase of the seasonal cycles the results have implications to econometric specifications of models which use short run data quarterly monthly

the role of co2 embodiment in us china trade abstract this study examines the influence of us china trade on national and global emissions of carbon dioxide co2 the three basic questions are as follows 1 what amount of co2 emissions is avoided in the us by importing chinese goods 2 how much are co2 emissions in china increased as a result of the production of goods for export to the us and 3 what are the impacts of us china trade on global co2 emissions our initial findings reveal that during 1997 2003 1 us co2 emissions would have increased from 3 to 6 if the goods imported from china had been produced in the us 2 about 7 14 of china s current co2 emissions were a result of producing exports for us consumers and 3 us china trade has increased global co2 emissions by an estimated 720 million metric tons we suggest that the export of us technologies and expertise related to clean production and energy efficiency to china could be a win win strategy for both countries for reducing their trade imbalance and mitigating global co2 emissions improved international accounting methodologies for assigning responsibility for co2 emissions must be designed to account for the dynamic nature of international trade

regional welfare weights for the uk england scotland wales and northern ireland evans d kula e and sezer h 2005 regional welfare weights for the uk england scotland wales and northern ireland regional studies 39 923 937 in relation to public spending and regional policy the importance of distributional issues is stressed and regional welfare weights are derived from an appropriate underlying social welfare function estimates of these weights are then provided for the four countries comprising the uk welfare weights now have a very high policy profile following the special emphasis placed by the uk treasury in its recently revised guidance on appraisal and evaluation in government on the assessment of the distributional impacts of social projects and policies from an empirical perspective the critical component of each welfare weight measure is the elasticity of marginal utility of income e alternative estimation approaches based on demand analysis and income tax data are used to determine e and a preferred measure of 1 60 emerges the resulting regional we

structural change in the demand for meat economists have long thought that shocks in the economy sometimes lead to permanent changes in behavioral relationships hence supply or demand elasticities estimated from econometric models may change over time the source of such structural change may be technological adoption a shift in consumer preferences or an institutional change one way to handle this problem in linear models is to allow the parameters to change as the situation changes so that the model provides a local approximation of the behavioral relationship this approach is an attractive way to deal with structural change problems econometricians have extended the classical