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

residential energy demand in oecd countries and the role of irreversible efficiency improvements abstract after undergoing substantial changes during a period of high energy prices household energy demand did not rebound in times of declining energy prices as might have been expected hence other factors such as irreversible improvements in technical efficiency must be understood in order to describe both past and future household energy demand in this paper we consider irreversible efficiency improvements as a major reason for the moderate growth in energy demand after the plummeting of the oil price in 1985 we test different econometric models to take into account efficiency indicators the major conclusions of our investigation are i price elasticities are different for rising and falling prices for the latter they are close to zero implying a low rebound effect in the residential sector ii technical efficiency is an important parameter for describing and forecasting energy demand and iii income elasticities turn out to be higher once we incorporate indicators of technological efficiency in the process of estimating energy demand

estimating the choice behavior of self employed business proprietors an application to dairy farmers the vast majority of business concerns operating in contemporary market oriented economies are owned and controlled by a single individual and perhaps family members yet little work has been performed in the area of estimating the choice behavior of self employed business proprietors particularly under conditions where production and consumption decisions are interdependent lau lin and yotopolous 16 barnum and squire 2 and others have developed models to analyze and estimate the complete choice behavior of farm households in developing nations these analyses invariably separate production and consumption decisions so that the sole link between the two sides of the model lies in the impact of farm profit on the household budget constraint this type of separability implicitly assumes the existence of perfect markets for all goods and inputs while this assumption may be a valid approximation for many farm households in developing economies it is not generally applicable to self employed proprietors especially those operating in more advanced economies 8 19 21 26 to my knowledge only two prior empirical studies have been performed which attempt to analyze the choice behavior of self employed business proprietors under conditions where production and consumption decisions are interdependent brown and lapan 4 employ aggregate u s time series data to estimate physician labor and output supply responses to changes in output price their estimation procedure centers on a single reduced form output supply equation parameter estimates are interpreted in the context of the theoretical framework assuming constant returns to scale technology and homothetic preferences they conclude that while the physician labor supply curve is backward bending the output supply curve is positively sloped lopez 19 formulates a model analyzing the interdependent production and labor supply decisions of households that own and operate a farm his framework integrates output input and labor supply choices and allows for differences in preferences between on farm and off farm work imposing constant returns to scale and using cross section canadian data aggregated by census division he jointly estimates output supply input demand on farm and off farm labor

tax perceptions and preferences over tax structure in the united kingdom do voters know their tax liabilities accurately or do they systematically misperceive them could such misperceptions influence voters choices over alternative tax structures proposed by politicians this paper assesses the accuracy of individuals tax perceptions in the uk using micro data from the british social attitudes survey 1995 and tests an empirical model of the determinants of tax structure preferences including tax misperceptions a systematic bias towards over estimation of income and expenditure tax vat liabilities is found and individ uals tax preferences appear to be both dominated by self interest and distorted by tax misperceptions whether using a traditional utility maximisation framework or a variety of public choice frameworks economists agree that consumer voters or taxpayer voters dislike taxes taxes lower the consumption possibility set and thereby utility politicians proposing higher taxes expect to lose votes unless they can persuade voters that the utility gain from the use of those taxes will exceed the tax induced utility loss of course the extent of individuals losses will depend on their circumstances and how revenues are raised the tax structure traditional tax incidence and excess burden analyses and models of political costs associated with the tax structure hettich and winer 1984 1988 each provide guidance on the extent to which different individuals may be expected to suffer and vote differently under alternative tax structures much will depend on attitudes towards and perceptions of specific taxes especially personal income taxes and consumption taxes underlying most such analyses are two common presumptions i tax preferences are dictated by self interest and ii individuals accurately assess their tax liabilities and so make informed choices two largely independent areas of literature have challenged these assumptions first models incorporating altruism

earmarked taxation welfare versus political support abstract compared with the traditional public finance approach of a monolithic fully informed planner earmarking of taxation is less likely to be optimal if a principal agent setting is considered where taxing and spending are performed by two separate agents which are monitored by the parliament we assume that the parliament either maximizes welfare or expected votes vote maximizers are more inclined to choose earmarking but at the price of inefficiently high costs

effects of farm size education and off farm income on productive efficiency of dairy farmers in utah a stochasitc frontier approach this study is primarily concerned with investigating the technical allocative and scale inefficiency of owner operators of dairy farms in utah a stochastic production frontier has been applied to analyze these inefficiencies the results indicate that there is positive association between years of education and productivity of labor and capital productivity is also found to be negatively related to off farm income regarding the effects of farm size on efficiency it is found that large farms are the most efficient of all sizes considered separate estimates of technical allocative and scale inefficiencies indicate that large and medium sized farms are technically more efficient than small farms large farms on average are found to be performing much better than medium sized and small farms so far as allocative and scale inefficiency are concerned copyright 1989 by mit press

welfare analysis of tax reforms using household data abstract this paper discusses a methodology for calculating the distribution of gains and losses from a policy change using data for a large sample of households estimates are based on the equivalent income function which is money metric utility defined over observable variables this enables calculations to be standardised and a computer program to compute the statistics presented in the paper is available for a general demand system equivalent income is related to measures of deadweight loss and standard errors are computed for each of the welfare measures an application to u k data for 5 895 households is given which simulates a reform that involves eliminating housing subsidies

endogenous price policies and international wheat prices vanzetti and kennedy s herein vk comment on our earlier paper sarris and freebairn gives us the opportunity first to clarify the differences in the models to present a generalization of the analysis that includes their results as well as ours as special cases and then to point out some salient features of our model that seem to have been unnoticed by them consider our model of a homogenous commodity produced consumed and traded by n countries which are characterized by the following linear demand and supply curves notation follows vk except that we maintain the additive random variables and hence keep the time subscript

how robust is the uniform emissions pricing rule to social equity concerns abstract this paper examines pollution tax differentiation across industries in light of social equity concerns using theoretical and numerical general equilibrium analyses in an optimal tax framework we characterize the drivers for non uniform optimal taxes stemming from the interaction of household heterogeneity with social preferences quantitatively assessing the case of price based co2 emissions control in the u s economy we find that uniform emissions pricing is approximately optimal when social concerns are defined over inequity induced by the environmental tax the deviation from uniform emissions pricing however becomes non negligible when pollution tax rebates deviate much from optimal transfer schemes or when social concerns are defined over both policy induced impacts and inequity unrelated to environmental policy our results are robust to a number of model extensions including the stringency of the environmental target downstream vs upstream taxation pre existing distortionary taxes and parametric uncertainty in firms and households equilibrium tax responses

energy populism and household welfare we study a cycle of subsidized energy prices and estimate its welfare impact on households in the buenos aires metropolitan region a simple framework explains its emergence in terms of the preference of a median household voter for receiving transfer gains followed by a future flow of transfer losses we evaluate actual transfers and welfare effects that a departure of prices of natural gas and electricity generation from opportunity costs since 2003 had on households and explore the impact of a way back to opportunity cost pricing

estimation of profit functions when profit is not maximum this paper deals with derivation and implications of profit functions when profit is not maximum due to the presence of either technical inefficiency or allocative inefficiency or both we show that input demand and output supply elasticities and returns to scale are in general affected by these inefficiencies we also show that the overall profit efficiency is not necessarily the product of technical and allocative efficiencies meaning that technical and allocative inefficiencies are not necessarily independent estimation techniques are developed for both cross sectional and panel data models working of the model is illustrated using a panel of 60 salmon farms copyright 2001 oxford university press

sensitivity of optimal commodity taxes to relaxing leisure goods separability and to the wage rate abstract this paper uses a new labour augmented demand functional form to calculate optimal commodity taxes for india the optimal taxes which are far from uniform are extremely sensitive to deviation from leisure goods separability and to variation in the wage rate parameter

can chinese state enterprises perform like market entities productive efficiency in the chinese iron and steel industry as a consequence of economic reforms in china firms have ben affected by three essential changes first instead of surrendering all profits to the government firms now pay tax on their profits according to a contract between them and the government and retain the balance as their own controllable surplus second the central economic plan determines only part of firms production after fulfilling the command plan firms are allowed to adjust their production scale by the availability of inputs and the profitability of production third most consumer and investment goods have two prices a plan price and a market price as most of the plan prices are always lower than the market prices the latter play a basic role in determining firms profits after a decade of economic reforms the important question is can chinese state enterprises perform like market entities the analysis shows that chinese firms in transition domimic the production behaviour of market based efficiency oriented firms

oil prices and the terms of trade abstract the combination of substantial terms of trade variability and unstable correlation patterns of trade prices with output and trade volumes has led some to suggest a break in the link between trade volumes and prices we find that oil accounts for much of the variation in the terms of trade over the last twenty five years and its quantitative role varies significantly over time and since our dynamic general equilibrium model predicts that the economy responds differently to oil supply shocks than to other shocks changes in their relative importance helps to account for the unstable correlations in the data

nepotism discrimination and the persistence of utility maximizing owner operated firms reply much debate in the discrimination literature surrounds whether employers with biased preferences can persist in the market 7 10 this issue is a natural extension of the broader literature on owner operated firms which focuses on the consistency of utility and profit maximization 12 13 14 18 26 27 theories of owner operated firms which have a long history in economics model the entrepreneur as both a producer and consumer of goods that determines the level of production and consumption jointly through utility maximization 2 9 16 22 31 this approach is applied in this paper to examine employer discrimination and nepotism our analysis provides necessary conditions for utility maximizing firms to persist in the market and shows how biased preferences can yield seemingly uneconomic input and output choices that are in fact rationally inefficient empirical results using data on family farms support the prediction that utility maximizing entrepreneurs trade profit for nonmarket goods and do not hire inputs to maximize profits competitive neoclassical theories of the labor market do not provide a clear theoretical resolution to the issue of persistence of employer nepotism and discrimination the employer discrimination model proposed by becker 4 5 and extended by arrow 1 postulates that entrepreneurs maximize utility that increases with profit but decreases with a nonmarket attribute of some workers e g race ethnicity or gender these models predict that white male workers may initially have better market opportunities than comparable minority or female workers however entrepreneurs who hire based on nonproductive attributes are also predicted to earn less than a normal rate of return and because they derive disutility from an aspect of owning and operating a firm can improve their welfare by leaving the industry and converting firm assets to those that do not require employment decisions e g stocks and bonds this result has the important policy implication that market intervention may not be necessary to improve the relative pay and employment of disadvantaged groups when employers are the source of the discrimination alternatively goldberg 15 uses the arrow 1 framework but postulates that employers

renewables diffusion and contagion effect in italian regional electricity markets assessment and policy implications abstract in the electricity market sudden price jumps occur more frequently than in other markets due to the peculiarity of electricity furthermore the structural spot characteristics of the electricity market determine high price variability all these characteristics have been accentuated by the dramatic increase of renewable energy supply in italy starting in 2010 these features suggest the possibility of contagion effects across italian regional electricity markets considering contagion such as a sudden and significant increase in cross market links arising from a shock to a specific market in this paper we investigate whether such a renewable energy increase has affected the contagion behavior in the italian electricity spot market taking into account both the difference between interdependence and contagion and the direction of the shock we find empirical evidence with significant tests that no changes have occurred in interdependence mechanism nor in contagion effects due to renewable energy sources development in italy

technology and efficiency in a panel of italian dairy farms an sgm restricted cost function approach this article employs a short term specification of the symmetric generalised mcfadden sgm cost function capable of accommodating quasi fixed factors and variable returns temporary equilibrium and scale economies are investigated while maintaining the consistency of the estimated model with microeconomic theory and approximation properties it also makes use of a two step procedure to estimate first the technology parameters and then time varying efficiency at farm level no distributional assumptions are required on efficiency as we consider a fixed effect model a balanced panel of italian dairy farms during the years from 1980 to 1992 serves as the case study the results suggest a rigid productive structure during the pre and post quota period moreover italian milk producers are found to exhibit considerable excess capacity and rather low input technical efficiency

the theory of reform and indian indirect taxes abstract given a set of value judgements an initial state and a model of the economy one can ask whether some feasible tax change would increase welfare we do this by defining the marginal cost in terms of welfare of raising an extra rupee from the i th good the inverse optimum problem is the calculation of non negative welfare weights on households which imply that the initial state is optimum if no such welfare weights exist then a pareto improvement is possible we illustrate the concepts and results using data from the indian economy for 1979 1980 directions of tax reform for a number of specific social welfare functions and for pareto improvements are presented

tax reform from the gradient projection viewpoint abstract this paper examines the problems of gradual tax reform desirable small moves of the tax system are determined using the principles of the well known gradient projection algorithm three classical models of public finance are considered for each of them a continuous time dynamic process is exhibited along which the social welfare function increases until convergence to local second best extrema although the selection of trajectories according to the gradient projection method has some arbitrariness it leads to intuitively and economically appealing rules such as a tax reform analog of the classical optimal taxation result on production efficiency

price distortions and resource use efficiency in indian agriculture a restricted profit function approach this paper develops a generalized profit function that incorporates price distortions resulting from imperfect market conditions sociopolitical and institutional constraints as well as technical and allocative inefficiency the model is applied to test 1 the appropriateness of the neoclassical profit function and 2 the effect of education and farm size on allocative performance using farm level data from indian agriculture empirical results reject the neoclassical profit maximization hypothesis based on market prices in favor of the general model with price distortions and therefore help to improve allocation of inputs and output farm size is found to reduce price distortions only for small farmers copyright 1992 by mit press

oil and the macroeconomy since the 1970s economists have long been intrigued by empirical evidence that suggests that oil price shocks may be closely related to macroeconomic performance this interest dates back to the 1970s the 1970s were a period of growing dependence on imported oil unprecedented disruptions in the global oil market and poor macroeconomic performance in the united states thus it was natural to suspect a causal relationship from oil prices to u s macroeconomic aggregates since then a large body of work has accumulated that purports to establish this link on theoretical grounds and to provide empirical evidence in its support we do not attempt a comprehensive survey of this literature but rather provide an idiosyncratic synthesis of what we view as the key issues in this debate and the insights gained over the last 30 years the timing seems right for such an account although the experience of the 1970s continues to play an important role in discussions of the link between oil and the macroeconomy there have been a number of new oil price shocks since the 1970s notably the 1986 collapse of oil prices and the 2000 boom in oil prices as well as the oil price increases associated with the 1990 1991 gulf war and the 2003 iraq war given this richer case history we are arguably in a better position than two decades ago to distinguish the idiosyncratic features of each oil crisis from the systematic effects increases in oil prices have been held responsible for recessions periods of excessive inflation reduced productivity and lower economic growth in this paper we review the arguments supporting such views first we highlight some of the conceptual difficulties in assigning a central role to oil price shocks in explaining

energy consumption economic growth and prices a reassessment using panel vecm for developed and developing countries this paper reinvestigates the energy consumption gdp growth nexus in a panel error correction model using data on 20 net energy importers and exporters from 1971 to 2002 among the energy exporters there was bidirectional causality between economic growth and energy consumption in the developed countries in both the short and long run while in the developing countries energy consumption stimulates growth only in the short run the former result is also found for energy importers and the latter result exists only for the developed countries within this category in addition compared to the developing countries the developed countries elasticity response in terms of economic growth from an increase in energy consumption is larger although its income elasticity is lower and less than unitary lastly the implications for energy policy calling for a more holistic approach are discussed c 2006 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

induced innovation and energy prices this paper uses u s patent data from 1970 to 1994 to study the impact of energy prices on energy efficient innovations theories of technological change have focused both on demand side factors which spur innovative activity by increasing the value of new innovations and supply side factors such as scientific advancements that make new innovations possible data on demand side factors are easily obtained but data on supply side factors that influence innovation are not readily available this paper uses patent citations as a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge citations to previous patents are used to construct productivity estimates which measure the usefulness of the existing stock of knowledge to inventors in a given energy field for any given year these estimates are then combined with data on demand side factors to estimate a model of induced innovation in energy technologies the results indicate that both energy prices and the supply of knowledge have strongly significant positive effects on innovation the paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of this work for environmental policy

dalton improving tax reform when households differ in ability and needs abstract in a previous paper we suggested a method for identifying tax reforms that adhere to dalton s principle of transfers approving a small enough transfer from rich to poor however even the weak requirement from that method namely prescribing a uni dimensional ordinal ranking of households by how deserving they are of a marginal income transfer is con fining here we extend the approach by formulating a two dimensional criterion for a dalton improving tax reform when there is social approval for transfers when other things are equal from the more able to the less able and from less needy households to more needy ones the possibility of applying this extended criterion in practice and a comparison with other criteria is carried out using the example of u k excise taxes

off farm work and technical efficiency on u s dairies in this study we investigate the impact of an increase in farm households off farm work on technical efficiency te of u s dairies we present a theoretical framework that implies that an increase in farm household off farm work decreases te we use two nationally representative samples of u s dairies 2010 and 2005 agricultural resource management surveys and a parametric approach stochastic frontier analysis to empirically test the hypothesis results are generally consistent with the hypothesis and show that an increase in off farm work by the farm household is associated with a significant decrease in te in addition results show that there is a statistically significant difference in te between small medium and large farms small farms are associated with significantly higher off farm work and have lower te than large farms which implies that less off farm work by households with larger farms is at least partially responsible for the evidence of economies of scale in the u s dairy industry

how sensitive are consumer expenditures to retail energy prices abstract there is growing evidence that the primary effect of energy price shocks on the u s economy involves a reduction in consumer spending we quantify the direct effect on real consumption of unanticipated changes in discretionary income shifts in precautionary savings and changes in the operating cost of energy using durables the possibility of asymmetries in the response of real consumption to energy price shocks is also considered we demonstrate that linear models are consistent with the symmetric behavior of real consumption in 1979 when energy prices increased sharply and in 1986 when they fell sharply it is shown that historically energy price shocks have been an important factor in explaining u s real consumption growth but by no means the dominant factor

optimal taxes and the structure of preferences if optimal tax theory is to be the basis for calculating tax rates a close understanding is required of the relationship between the structure of preferences and the configuration of optimal tax rates otherwise hypotheses chosen by the econometrician for practical convenience may completely determine the results independently of measurement this paper explores the relationship between various types of separability particularly weak and implicit separability and optimal tax rates in the various models discussed in the literature the use of distance functions and the antonelli matrix provides a significant unification of previously disparate results in the final analysis optimal tax theory should be the basis for actual calculation of tax rates although recently there have been great advances in theoretical results and in our understanding of their meaning we are still some way from a working knowledge of whether uniform commodity taxes are in practice optimal or if not which commodities should be discriminated against present theoretical formulae do not yield clear cut results except in special cases and it has recently become clear that optimal rates depend crucially on the detailed structure of consumer preferences for example atkinson and stiglitz 3 show that with an optimal nonlinear income tax discriminatory commodity taxes are only necessary to the extent that individual commodities are not weakly separable from leisure more recently deaton 6 has shown that a similar result holds for what is perhaps the most interesting of the standard models that where there are many consumers and only a linear income tax and proportional commodity taxes are allowed in this case separability between goods and leisure together with linear engel curves for goods removes the need for differential commodity taxation in consequence nothing can be learned about commodity taxes from consumer demand studies in which commodity demands are explained conditionally on total expenditure and commodity prices and which assume linear engel curves all such studies require separability from leisure as a maintained hypothesis and so are consistent with uniform commodity taxation these results suggest that the prospects for meaningful empirical calculations of tax rates are bleak econometricians estimating commodity demand and labor supply equations make generous use of separability assumptions to enable estimation at all in consequence it is likely that empirically calculated tax rates based on econometric estimates of parameters will be determined in structure not by the measurements actually made but by arbitrary untested and even unconscious hypotheses chosen by the econometrician for practical convenience to remedy this situation and as a prelude to fruitful empirical work it is necessary to have a more explicit understanding of how preference structure affects optimal tax rates such is the object of this paper three different

technical efficiency of finnish brewing plants a production frontier approach in recent years there has been a substantial change in the common approach to estimating production functions this is primarily the result of the stochastic frontier production model developed by aigner et al 1977 and meeusen and van den broeck 1977 their approach accords with the textbook definition of the production function which is a locus of maximum output levels from given input sets thus a one sided error term is introduced into the frontier production model since all the firms in an industry are not able to produce the frontier output this one sided error is interpreted as technical inefficiency which represents the amount by which a firm s output falls short of the maximum possible output earlier studies that applied this new approach involved estimation of the mean level of efficiency for the industry the subsequent literature has developed techniques to estimate technical inefficiency for each firm in the industry for example jondrow et al 1982 developed techniques to estimate technical inefficiency for each production unit when technical inefficiency is distributed as either half normal or exponential and is independent of the inputs used this last assumption is relaxed in kumbhakar 1987a and the estimation technique is extended to cover panel data the primary motivation for applications of frontier estimation techniques is the measurement of inefficiency this exercise thus has some direct policy relevance see schmidt 1985 86 in this paper we estimate the technical efficiency of 17 finnish brewing plants using panel data 1955 84 the distinguishing features of this study are that the data is of high quality and the observation period is long

a computational procedure for calculating optimal commodity taxes with illustrative evidence from indian budget data a simple procedure for calculating optimal commodity taxes is proposed which takes into account the simultaneous interdependence of taxes expenditure and price levels responses the method also allows for the social marginal utility of income to depend on prices besides expenditures in a manner implied by the assumed preference functional form illustrative calculations on indian budget data provide evidence not only in favor of the procedure but of considerable sensitivity of directions of marginal tax reforms to the data set rural or urban used and of optimal tax estimates to demand functional form copyright 1989 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

scale factor intensity and efficiency an empirical study of the chinese coal industry this paper deals with the interrelationship among firm scale factor intensity and efficiency using the chinese industrial survey data in 1985 and stochastic frontier models according to empirical

profit efficiency among bangladeshi rice farmers abstract production inefficiency is usually analyzed by its three components technical allocative and scale efficiency in this study we provide a direct measure of production efficiency of the bangladeshi rice farmers using a stochastic profit frontier and inefficiency effects model the data which are for 1996 include seven conventional inputs and several other background factors affecting production of modern or high yielding varieties hyvs of rice spread across 21 villages in three agro ecological regions of bangladesh the results show that there are high levels of inefficiency in modern rice cultivation the mean level of profit efficiency is 77 suggesting that an estimated 23 of the profit is lost due to a combination of technical allocative and scale inefficiency in modern rice production the efficiency differences are explained largely by infrastructure soil fertility experience extension services tenancy and share of non agricultural income

frontier production functions and technical efficiency a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics abstract the modelling and estimation of frontier production functions has been an important area of econometric research during the last two decades forsund lovell and schmidt 1980 and schmidt 1986 present reviews of the concepts and models involved and cite some of the empirical applications which had appeared to their respective times of publication this paper seeks to update the econometric modelling of frontier production functions associated with the estimation of technical efficiency of individual firms a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics is an important part of the paper

tax reform and temporary inefficiency abstract if any type of direct income redistribution is permitted a very weak condition ensures that it will not be desirable or necessary to permit production inefficiency in the process of a pareto improving tax reform inefficiency arises in models which make an implausible set of assumptions about the range of policies available to the government

tobacco consumption and taxation in italy an application of the quaids model estimates are presented of the demand for tobacco in italy in the context of a demand system approach the grouping of goods is based on varian s non parametric test for weak separability the parametric demand model is banks blundell and lewbel s quaids model which combines the empirical flexibility of quadratic logarithmic engel curves with integrability estimation is by iterative gmm procedure the estimates are used in an analysis of welfare improving tax reforms which incorporates distributional data the results are discussed with respect to the special features of the italian tobacco market

contagious energy prices we develop an empirical model of the determinants of end use energy prices in 28 organisation for economic co operation and development countries for this we construct a unique panel data set and formulate a spatial panel econometric model with fixed country effects for the period of 1980 2009 a special feature of the proposed empirical model is that cross country interdependence in energy prices surfaces through two channels a metric of similarity towards energy policy and a metric of trade in energy goods we estimate the parameters of that model and conduct several comparative static experiments we find that higher income per capita and lower efficiency in energy distribution tend to raise energy prices whereas higher net imports of energy and more abundant energy resource endowments reduce them we also find that bilateral trade in energy goods is an important channel of transmission of shocks in energy prices across countries the estimation results suggest that countries that use the same types of resources to generate energy are likely to transmit energy price shocks to each other through competition effects

the relationship between energy consumption energy prices and economic growth time series evidence from asian developing countries this paper estimates the causal relationships between energy consumption and income for india indonesia the philippines and thailand using cointegration and error correction modelling techniques the results indicate that in the short run unidirectional granger causality runs from energy to income for india and indonesia while bidirectional granger causality runs from energy to income for thailand and the philippines in the case of thailand and the philippines energy income and prices are mutually causal the study results do not support the view that energy and income are neutral with respect to each other with the exception of indonesia and india where neutrality is observed in the short run c 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classifications c22 q43 q48

the measurement and sources of technical inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry production function models are estimated with a time series of cross section data on indonesian weaving establishments the sources of technical inefficiency are investigated three firm attributes are identified as being potentially related to firm efhciency tbey are firm ownership age and size the importance of these attributes as sources of inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry is investigated and the implications of the find ings discussed

assessing the impact of economic liberalization across countries a comparison of dairy industry efficiency in canada and the usa this paper examines and compares the technical efficiency measures of ontario and new york dairy producers for the period 1992 to 1998 a nonparametric stochastic frontier model is introduced to estimate technical efficiency the backfitting algorithm of breiman and friedman is used to estimate the frontier empirical results indicate that during the period of study new york dairy farmers produced milk more efficiently than ontario dairy producers but the magnitude of the difference was small the estimated mean technical efficiency for the former group is 0 602 as compared to 0 532 for the latter the results also indicated that over time dairy farms in both regions improved their level of technical efficiency furthermore no correlation was found between farm size and estimated technical efficiency

a leaky bucket in the real world estimating inequality aversion using survey data existing evidence of inequality aversion relies on data from class room experiments where subjects face hypothetical questions this paper estimates the magnitude of inequality aversion using representative survey data with questions related to the real economy situations the respondents face the results reveal that inequality aversion can be measured in a meaningful way using survey data but the magnitudes of the estimates depend dramatically on how inequality aversion is measured no matter how measured the revealed inequality aversion predicts opinions on a wide range of questions related to the welfare state such as the level of taxation tax progressivity and the structure of unemployment benefits

undominated directions of tax reform abstract this article considers the reform of a commodity tax system consumers preferences over directions of tax reform are constructed from indirect utility functions a wicksellian decision procedure is used to define a dominance relation on the set of directions of change direction x dominates direction y if and only if a everybody prefers x to y or b x is the status quo and at least one person prefers x to y a number of characterizations of undominated directions of change are provided a related unanimity rule procedure which does not single out the status quo for special treatment is also considered particular attention is paid to the issue of whether wicksellian reforms preserve production efficiency remarks on the relationship between this work previous work in optimal taxation theory and social choice theory are also provided

developing country interests in agricultural trade reform this paper examines whether developing countries as a group would be better off in the absence of agricultural protection in the industrial north and if so whether they should support reforms negotiated between the major players in the uruguay round results from the tyers anderson gls model of world food markets suggest that the net effect of industrial country agricultural protection is beneficial to developing countries though by only a small margin even if its removal were to stimulate accelerated technical change in developing countries the same is found to be true of partial reforms which are more palatable politically such as quotas to reduce oversupply in the ec of course many developing countries including those which are members of the cairns group are badly hurt by protection in the north unfortunately however they and the other members of that group stand to gain comparatively little from the reduction of oversupply in the ec through quotas

manufacturing energy use in eight oecd countries decomposing the impacts of changes in output industry structure and energy intensity this paper examines trends in manufacturing energy use in eight oecd countries decomposing the changes that occured between 1973 and 1987 into the effects of changes in aggregate manufacturing activity industry structure and energy intensities measured at the industry group level while manufacturing production grew in every country except the uk the rate of growth was variable from nation to nation structural change led to modest reductions in energy use in most countries although in norway structural change led to substantial growth in energy use the reduction in energy intensities was strikingly uniform across all nations ranging from 20 norway to 36 japan over the period of the analysis while other studies have used divisia decomposition techniques we use an alternative method based on laspeyres indices a comparison of the two techniques shows that they yield closely similar empirical results although the laspeyres approach is more easily interpreted while the interactions between changes in structure and intensity are arbitrarily assigned to the two factors by the divisia approach the lapeyres method yields interaction terms that explicitly account for such effects

off farm work technical efficiency and rice production risk in taiwan this article investigates the differences in yield production production efficiency and yield risk for farmers both with and without off farm work using a nationwide survey of rice farmers in taiwan we estimate two stochastic production frontier models that accommodate technical inefficiency and production risk simultaneously for farmers both with and without off farm work the stochastic dominance criterion is then applied to compare the differences in the distributions of the estimated technical efficiency and yield risk between groups the empirical results indicate that these two groups of farmers use resources in different ways and off farm work is not necessarily associated with lower technical efficiency for farmers in the lower percentiles of the efficiency distribution those with off farm work are more efficient than their counterparts without off farm work in addition farmers with off farm work face higher production risk and this result is robust for the entire distribution

tariff design and reform in a revenue constrained economy theory and an illustration from india abstract this paper develops the theory of design and reform of protective tariffs in a revenue constrained small open economy characterized by learning by doing it shows that revenue raising requires wedges between consumer prices and shadow prices while protection when typically not achievable via subsidies directly targeted towards factor market distortions requires wedges between producer prices and shadow prices illustrative calculations in a modestly disaggregated general equilibrium model of india support the view that uniformity in protective tariffs is likely to be a reasonably good policy in situations where the government intends no discrimination within the sectors already identified for special treatment

short run returns to scale farm size and economic efficiency this paper analyzes the effects of returns to scale farm size technical allocative and scale inefficiencies on the profitability of utah dairy farms it derives the conditions necessary to compare the profitability of farms within and between different size classifications as small medium and large some comparative static results regarding increases in input prices and a decrease or withdrawal of price support on profitability of small medium and large farms are presented copyright 1993 by mit press