smallholder market participation concepts and evidence from eastern and southern africa abstract this paper reviews the evidence on smallholder market participation with a focus on staple foodgrains i e cereals in eastern and southern africa in an effort to help better identify what interventions are most likely to break smallholders out of the semi subsistence poverty trap that appears to ensnare much of rural africa the conceptual and empirical evidence suggests that interventions aimed at facilitating smallholder organization at reducing the costs of intermarket commerce and perhaps especially at improving poorer households access to improved technologies and productive assets are central to stimulating smallholder market participation and escape from semi subsistence poverty traps macroeconomic and trade policy tools appear less useful in inducing market participation by poor smallholders in the region

resolving differences in willingness to pay and willingness to accept reply gwendolyn c morrison 1997 raises a logical point regarding our experimental test of the divergence between willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept wta measures of economic value shogren et al 1994 she argues that our design does not provide a true test of the existence of a fundamental endowment effect since we did not control for the potential of a pivoting indifference map daniel kahneman et al 1990 she concludes that even though our ev idence shows that the mean wtp and wta bids for market goods with close substitutes e g candy bars and coffee mugs converge after market experience the endowment effect might still be alive and well albeit at statisti cally insignificant levels

toward a broadened theory of preference formation and the diffusion of innovations cases from zinder province niger republic the standard model for the diffusion of innovations in consumer behavior does not adequately account for the incorporation of novel items of non local origin into the material culture inventory of hausa speaking peasants in niger a synthetic culturally relative model composed of elements drawn from the standard diffusion paradigm from world systems theory and from economic and symbolic anthropology provides a more satisfactory account of these processes analysis shows that novel goods provide a medium through which alternative paradigms of consumer behavior and reality contend among the hausa a premarket model a western market mediated model and an islamic ethnonationalist model compete for consumer affiliation

country of origin effects on product evaluations this article reviews the literature regarding the effect of country of origin on buyer evaluations of products the issue is important for countries especially resource poor developing countries that need to increase manufactured exports and for firms that source products in countries different from where sold marketing inferences are drawn and implications for future research are developed

reversing urban bias in african rice markets evidence from senegal summary urban bias constitutes an important institutional impediment to economic development in poor countries some african governments now recognize that they should invest in agricultural productivity in order to reverse urban bias but often forget the equally important objective of investing in quality tailored to consumers so as to reverse urban bias footprint on food markets we conduct framed field experiments in two major urban markets in senegal and find that the majority of urban consumers are willing to pay quality premiums for local rice suggesting that investment in post harvest rice quality is a priority in the reversal of urban bias 2012 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

cereals demand in the sahel and potential impacts of regional cereals protection abstract recent policy debate in the sahel has focused on a regional protection zone for cereals this paper discusses crosscountry evidence of consumption patterns and the sensitivity of these to policy variables and considers potential income distribution and efficiency impacts of a rice tariff increase a tariff would hurt the poor in the short term because the poor depend to a large extent on rice as a fast food purchased from street vendors the trend toward rice consumption is a long term structural phenomenon linked to urbanization rather than to short term price changes maize and millet sorghum are substitutes in consumption which should serve to encourage development of maize in the guinean zone to help assure sahel food security in drought years

goal programming data envelopment analysis godea for target based multi level planning allocating central grants to the greek local authorities abstract in this paper we develop an interface between goal programming and data envelopment analysis godea in order to integrate target setting and resource allocation in multi level planning problems data envelopment analysis dea has been traditionally used for assessing the performance of individual decision making units and therefore necessary extensions are needed to apply dea principles to the global organisational level without however losing its attractive features the method was originally developed as an aid to the reorganisation of the allocation of central funds to local authorities in greece

modeling food consumption decisions as a two step process this article evaluates the suitability of tobit analysis of food consumption patterns by comparing results generated by a tobit model and a modification with a two step decision process two samples of adult women were selected from the 1977 78 nationwide food consumption survey and the 1985 continuing survey of food intakes by individuals results show strong statistical evidence for questioning tobit analysis in examining food consumption decisions determinants of the decision to consume food within a particular food group often differ from the determinants of how much to consume particularly for more highly defined food groupings analysis of u s food consumption patterns and their dietary aspects with respect to consumer behavior has a long history traditionally ordinary least squares ols or some variant has been used in many studies where ols was not appropriate the tobit method was applied tobit allows for a discrete mass point for observations as well as a continuous range of values for the dependent variable this nonlinear method has yielded good results in a variety of studies e g mccracken and brandt lane and devaney and fraker this article examines the suitability of the tobit method for analysis of food consumption patterns the tobit method assumes that the decision to consume a given food item is the same as the decision about the amount of the food to consume ignoring the two step nature of the decision process may hamper understanding of true behavioral patterns lead to erroneous conclusions and generate incorrect policy recommendations this article compares results generated by a tobit model and a modification with a two step decision process in the next section the statistical methods used to test whether food consumption is a one or two step decision process are described the following sections discuss the variables and data present the results and consider the conclusions

measuring efficiencies and returns to scale of nippon telegraph telephone in production and cost analyses this article provides a theoretical framework related to data envelopment analysis dea in which an analytical relationship among eight different efficiency concepts is defined and explored in terms of production and cost analyses this article extends the theoretical basis into the measurement of scale economies se and returns to scale rts a unique feature of the se rts measurement is that the proposed approach is based upon the measurement regarding not only production activity but also cost performance as an important case study this article applies the dea based approach to measure the eight efficiency concepts and se rts of nippon telegraph telephone ntt this study finds that ntt has maintained high se and increasing rts in the operations of 39 annual periods from 1953 through 1992

a meta analysis of country of origin effects this note reports a quantitative analysis of the country of origin coo effect based on fifty two articles or papers containing sixty nine independent studies and 1 520 effect sizes an analysis of fifteen study characteristics revealed that country of origin effects are only somewhat generalizable using omega squared as the measure of effect size verbal product descriptions produced larger coo effect sizes than did the presence of an actual product likewise single cue studies produced larger coo effect sizes than did multiple cue studies and larger samples produced effect sizes that on average were greater than those produced by smaller samples the size of an observed coo effect was a function of whether the dependent variables was a quality reliability perception or a purchase intention the average effect size of quality reliability perceptions was 30 whereas the average effect size for purchase intentions was 19 purchase intentions were most susceptible to methodological artifacts than were quality reliability perceptions study findings selectively confirm and refute common beliefs regarding the impact of a country of origin cue on product perceptions and purchase intentions

tariff structure of japanese electric power companies an empirical analysis using dea this research explores a marginal cost mc based pricing system using data envelopment analysis dea this dea technique is widely applied for performance analysis and efficiency measurement in public and private sectors this article does not follow such a previous research direction rather directing itself towards the new measurement of mc and ramsey prices of multiple electric power services as an important case study this research applies the proposed dea approach to examine how much the current tariffs of japanese electric power services deviate from these mc and ramsey prices this type of research has never been explored in japan even though such a research effort is needed by many policy makers and consumers it is hoped that our empirical findings can serve as a policy making basis for guiding the japanese electric power industry this study believes that this japanese experience is useful for other nations such as asia pacific countries where many public industries are regulated by their governments

on the effects of barriers to international investment a simple model is presented in which it is costly for domestic investors to hold foreign assets the implications of the model for the composition of optimal portfolios at home and abroad are derived it is shown that all foreign assets with a beta larger than some beta plot on either one of two security market lines some foreign assets with a beta smaller than are not held by domestic investors even if their expected return is increased slightly while it is obviously not true that asset markets are completely segmented between countries there is evidence of barriers to international investment although reality seems to lie in that grey area between complete segmentation and no segmentation at all most international asset pricing models are concerned with the extreme case of no barriers to international investment no effort seems to have been made to study the effect on portfolio choice of such barriers which make it costly to hold foreign securities as opposed to domestic securities but which do not in general render international diversification so onerous that investors avoid foreign securities completely casual empiricism suggests that models without barriers to international investment should be suspect those models cannot explain why it appears that in every country investors on average hold more domestic securities than would be required if they held the world market portfolio 2 this paper constructs a model of international asset pricing in which there is a cost associated with holding either long or short risky foreign securities for the sake of simplicity in most of the paper we assume that while domestic investors face barriers to international investment foreign investors face no such barriers it turns out that nothing significant is lost with such an assumption the main conclusions of this paper for the case in which foreign investors face no barriers to international investment are 1 in the presence of barriers to international investment some risky foreign

consumer preferences for fresh food items with multiple quality attributes evidence from an experimental auction of pork chops this study illustrates an application of experimental auction methods using both experimental economics and experimental design to evaluate consumer perceptions and willingness to pay wtp for fresh pork chops we test and reject hypotheses that a market prices and consumers wtp are unaffected by the level of attributes embodied in the pork chops b appearance based on photographs or actual product and actual taste are equally good sources of consumer information and c consumers are consistent in their preferences for fresh pork attributes a major conclusion is that predicting consumer demand for fresh pork or any fresh food based on appearance without tasting is unproductive

technical efficiency and economies of scale in state owned enterprises the hellenic telecommunications organisation abstract in this paper we propose methodologies for assessing the relative efficiency of state owned enterprises that operate under monopolistic conditions irrespective of the ownership structure private or public monopolistic operation is often given unclear conflicting operating objectives by their principals or regulators and thus efficiency should be assessed using alternative objectives such as cost production and revenue on the methodological side the paper employs parametric functional forms using ordinary least squares and goal programming methods of estimation a secondary estimation stage was also pursued with the input output variables of the models being corrected for technical inefficiency the methodology was applied to examine the technical efficiency and economies of scale of the hellenic telecommunications organisation over the period 1971 1993

arbitrage equilibrium with transaction costs the general topic of this paper is the transmission of disturbances in asset markets the specific topic is the role of transaction costs in this transmission do high transaction costs shelter a market against foreign disturbances while bottling up domestic disturbances at home the question is considered in the context of a small scale general equilibrium model of asset arbitrage with quadratic transaction cost functions the main conclusion is that the transmission of disturbances depends more on the relationships between different transaction cost rates than on their absolute level a progressive decline of transaction costs therefore does not necessarily strengthen the transmission of disturbances nor can artificial increases of transaction costs be relied upon to reduce it copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

divestiture of nippon telegraph and telephone this article discusses whether the japanese government should break up ntt nippon telegraph telephone in 1995 as the u s federal government compelled at t american telephone telegram to break itself into toll and local telephone companies in 1984 the divestiture of ntt has long been a major industrial policy issue in japan since the common carrier was privatized in 1985 the governmental decision to divest it may influence not only the japanese telecommunications infrastructure but also the global telecommunications and information industries in the world where many common carriers are now facing an environmental change from regulation to competition a unique feature of this study is that it employs eight different estimation techniques to obtain a cost function of ntt so that this research avoids a methodological bias occurring in many empirical studies this study confirms that ntt has maintained cost subadditivity but it has failed to establish the status of a natural monopoly in the observed time period however it also finds that the ntt divestiture will not produce a price reducing benefit to japanese telecommunications consumers this research result will serve as empirical evidence for guiding the governmental review of this large scale industrial policy issue in japan

experimental auction procedure impact on valuation of quality differentiated goods despite increased use of experimental auctions a myriad of different procedures are being employed without formal consideration of how the procedures might affect results this study investigates the effect of several procedural issues on valuation estimates from experimental auctions results indicate the second price auction generates higher valuations than english becker degroot marschak bdm and random nth price auctions especially in latter bidding rounds and that random nth price auction yields lower valuations than english and bdm auctions we find that endowing subjects with a good prior to eliciting bids can have an impact on valuations but the effect varies across auction mechanism

rising trends and variability of rice prices threats and opportunities for sub saharan africa abstract nearly 40 of the rice consumed in africa is imported that is about one third of all rice traded in world markets with such high dependence on imports africa is highly exposed to international market shocks with sometimes grave consequences for its food security and political stability as attested by events during the 2008 food crisis in this paper it is argued that africa can turn the rising trends in world markets to a historical opportunity to realize its large potential for rice production after a review of the policy responses of african countries to the 2008 global rice crisis the opportunities and challenges for enhancing domestic rice supply are discussed the competitiveness of rice production in africa is analyzed for selected countries and rice ecologies the potential for increasing paddy production is illustrated using a spreadsheet simulation that considers alternative rice sector development scenarios reducing the yield gap and expanding cultivated rice areas under lowland and irrigated hold the greatest potential for substantially increasing paddy production in africa

the international allocation of savings with quadratic transaction or risk costs abstract quadratic transaction costs are used to explain to what extent the savings of a country are invested in the same country and to what extent they give rise to international capital flows more specifically it is shown that the high across countries correlation between saving and investment observed by feldstein and horioka could at least in part result from differences in transaction costs between internal and external investments this remains true even in the presence of an international asset without such differences in the particular model used transaction costs cannot be distinguished from risk jel f21

impacts of devaluation on senegalese households policy implications abstract in january 1994 the franc cfa was devaluated from 50 to 100 fcfa to the french franc this article uses detailed income and expenditure data to simulate the impact of the devaluation on real household income and identify the groups in senegal that are most damaged urban households are hit hardest because they consume large quantities of imported rice and do not earn income from exportables surprisingly one rural area is as negatively affected as the urban areas one experiences no change and a third realizes only a small 5 increase in real income these small or negative affects occur because consumption of imported rice is high which is still the case a year after devaluation and income from the production of exportable peanuts is low relatively strong positive impacts 14 16 increase in real income were realized only in the two zones where peanuts account for a large share of total income about 50 this is perhaps a more negative or in some cases ambiguous impact in rural areas than we think policymakers expected the difference from expectations is due to the higher than expected levels of rice consumption and the lower than expected shares of income earned from peanut production these two facts together lead to a greater negative demand side effect and smaller positive supply side effects of devaluation in several rural zones attention should be given to 1 policies to protect vulnerable groups and 2 policies to stimulate investment by groups realizing short run increases in income thereby channeling the short run benefits into actions that will foster long run economic growth

privatization of nippon telegraph and telephone was it a good policy decision nippon telegraph and telephone ntt corporation was privatized in 1985 under the economic assertion that a public enterprise is less efficient and less profitable than a private enterprise this assertion is referred to as the property right theory in economics and it is used as a theoretical rationale for privatizing publicly owned organizations this article empirically examines the economic assertion by comparing ntt s performance before and after its privatization data envelopment analysis dea is used as the research tool in this study which confirmed the economic assertion in terms of production based efficiency measures but it cannot find any major difference in its cost reducing corporate efforts thus this study presents serious management problems occurring within the ntt s partial privatization the partial privatization is now prevailing in the telecommunications industry all over the world this article also discusses the japanese business environment which makes ntt managerially ineffective under its public private joint ownership

consumer demand for rice grain quality and returns to research for quality improvement in southeast asia abundant world rice supply has led to renewed interest in improving grain quality of modem rice varieties implicit prices of grain characteristics are estimated for thailand indonesia and the philippines these prices are used to evaluate rice breeding goals and to estimate returns to research for quality improvement results indicate that the past focus on physical quality improvement was appropriate and future welfare gains are possible from chemical quality improvement returns to quality improvement are substantial and indicate underinvestment in this type of research as asian rice production grew faster than population from 1965 to 1980 the real price of rice declined in world markets and several asian countries flinn and unnevehr greater supply and falling prices have increased concern for rice grain quality improvement in national and international research programs in tropical asia khush in this article the consumer goods characteristics model develo ed bv ladd and suvannunt is used to estimaie thedimplicit prices of rice grain quality characteristics in thailand indonesia and the philippines these estimated implicit prices answer three questions a do observed consumer preferences correspond to measures of quality used to screen material in breeding programs b are consumer preferences similar across countries so that quality improvement can be undertaken at the international level c what are the returns to re

generic product advertising spillovers and market concentration we examine the decision to advertise a homogenous good we show that the likelihood of inefficiently low advertising rests heavily on how one models the mechanism by which advertising affects demand regardless of this mechanism however there is always a lower bound of concentration below which no advertising occurs even when welfare enhancing in such cases mandatory programs will raise welfare if they induce entry although producer surplus may decline our model also provides an explanation for the stylized fact that advertising intensity first rises and then falls as concentration increases copyright 2008 oxford university press

assessing the comparative spatial disadvantage csd of regions in the european union using non radial data envelopment analysis methods abstract in this paper we propose non radial data envelopment analysis models for assessing the comparative spatial disadvantage csd of the level ii regions of the european union eu csd is considered as a relatively new element of spatial efficiency which seeks to enhance the spectrum of the current methods used for assessing spatial inequality and dispersion the paper also proposes a goal programming formulation for assessing production function coefficients of the social cohesion among the regions of the eu assuming elimination of the levels of comparative disadvantage

stochastic frontier production analysis measuring performance of public telecommunications in 24 oecd countries abstract this study presents a new use of least absolute value lav estimation for obtaining parameter estimates of a stochastic frontier production function the lav estimation is combined with data envelopment analysis dea and the resulting dea lav estimates are examined by several statistical tests as an important application this study applies dea lav stochastic frontier production analysis for measuring and predicting the performance of public telecommunications in 24 oecd organization for economic cooperation and development countries this international comparison may serve as an empirical basis for understanding the telecommunications industries whose environments are now shifting from regulation to competition

transactions costs and covered interest arbitrage theory and evidence the extent to which deviations from covered interest parity can be attributed to transactions costs has been exaggerated in the economic literature because the swap market in foreign exchange has been ignored it is shown that such deviations should be no greater than the lowest of the transactions costs in one of three markets the swap market or either of the two relevant securities markets this reconciles the theory with the data which show spreads of no more than a few basis points however the empirical results have no direct bearing on the conventional market efficiency hypothesis

a goal programming constrained regression review of the bell system breakup the recently implemented court decision to break up bell american telephone telegraph co to accord with u s anti trust laws represents a highly significant policy decision which is proving to be influential in other countries as well as the u s the telecommunication industry is of such size and importance that even relatively small economies that might be lost with bell s breakup as a natural monopoly could involve substantial welfare losses to consumers and producers studies commissioned by the u s justice department that approached this topic by econometric methods reported that the evidence failed to support the contention that bell was a natural monopoly here a goal programming constrained regression as developed in the management science literature uses the same functional form and the same data but nevertheless reverses the main findings of the econometric studies in every one of the 20 years covered this kind of difference in results obtained by two different methods of analysis poi

geographical indications and the competitive provision of quality in agricultural markets the economics of geographical indications gis is assessed within a vertical product differentiation framework that is consistent with the competitive structure of agriculture it is assumed that certification costs are needed for gis to serve as collective credible quality certification devices and production of high quality product is endogenously determined we find that gis can support a competitive provision of quality and lead to clear welfare gains although they fall short of delivering the constrained first best the main beneficiaries are consumers producers may also accrue some benefit if production of the high quality products draws on scarce factors that they own copyright 2008 oxford university press

promoting sustainable intensification and productivity growth in sahel agriculture after macroeconomic policy reform abstract policy reforms and structural adjustment programs in sahelian countries have eliminated many public agricultural support programs creating a vacuum that has not yet been filled by the private sector sahelian farmers thus face more difficult access to inputs and higher input costs input use has stagnated or declined yet higher population and less land for expansion of cultivation make it vital to increase the productivity of already cultivated land through adoption of intensive agricultural production techniques while partial intensification is becoming common too little investment is occurring in inputs and land improvements that maintain soil fertility control erosion and improve water availability partial intensification therefore risks being an unsustainable strategy higher and more sustainable productivity growth requires significantly increased use of chemical and organic fertilizer improved seeds bunds and animal traction the dilemma is how to ensure that such investments are financially and economically profitable and affordable in terms of government budgets it is crucial to 1 improve input access and reduce the unit cost of inputs to farmers through infrastructure investment 2 increase the productivity of fertilizer and improved seed by encouraging complementary farm level investments 3 improve the coordination of input and output marketing systems and improve incentives for private sector involvement 4 improve farmers ability to buy inputs using credit and non farm income 5 reduce the financial risks of purchased input use through integrated input output markets and innovative credit schemes and 6 evaluate the net economic benefits of selected agricultural support programs including input subsidies

measuring the relative importance of preferences for country of origin in china france niger and the united states recent labeling policies in developed countries place new focus on origin labeling especially country of origin labeling for a variety of food products it is not clear if this new emphasis on origin is the result of more ethnocentric consumer preferences for food we measure consumer preferences for country of origin in four different international locations and one domestic control location using a conjoint experiment to test the null hypotheses that consumers do not have stronger own country preferences in addition we compare the relative importance of consumer preferences for origin to their preferences for genetically modified food and pesticide free production using attribute coefficients from within location ordered probit models the study was conducted in china france niger and the united states we find consumers tend to prefer food from their own location indicating ethnocentric tendencies do play a role in shaping country of origin preferences country of origin is generally less important to consumers than genetically modified food content and pesticide use in food production