socio economic characteristics and the effect of taxation as a health policy instrument abstract this paper analyses the quantitative effects of using economic instruments in health policy on the basis of price elasticities calculated from estimated demand systems the nutritional effects of various taxation schemes are compared for households in different age groups and social classes focusing on the consumption of saturated fats fibre and sugar it is generally found that the impact of price instruments is stronger for lower social classes than in other groups of the population with regard to age groups it is mostly the youngest that decrease their demand for saturated fat in response to price changes while it is mostly the middle aged who exhibit price responsiveness in their demand for sugar these groups are however not considered as key target groups for dietary regulation thus tax instruments may be effective in improving diets on average but the design of the instruments and the targeting of vulnerable groups with special needs should be done with care it should be noted that a tax on a single nutrient or food may have undesired effects on the demand for other food components though this may be avoided by introducing taxes subsidies on several food products simultaneously

renewable natural resource management and use without markets natural resources by their nature are not readily bent to the status of private property efficient resource use is complicated by jurisdictional externalities public goods non use values and beneficiaries spatially separated from the location of resources the task is made more challenging by ecological complexity that obscures cause benefits and effects costs and dramatic time lags between individual actions and subsequent social consequences that together with substantial uncertainty introduce the chance of irreversibilities resource economists have played a major role in the literature on externalities the development of individual transferable quotas non market valuation techniques and common property management

fuel demand elasticities for energy and environmental policies indian sample survey evidence india has been running large scale interventions in the energy sector over the last decades still there is a dearth of reliable and readily available price and income elasticities of demand to base these on especially for domestic use of traditional fuels this study uses the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids using micro data of more than 100 000 households sampled across india the la aids model is expanded by specifying the intercept as a linear function of household characteristics marshallian and hicksian price and expenditure elasticities of demand for four main fuels are estimated for both urban and rural areas by different income groups these can be used to evaluate recent and current energy policies the results can also be used for energy projections and carbon dioxide simulations given different growth rates for different segments of the indian population

structural change in urban chinese food preferences we undertake a range of tests for structural food preference change in urban china using provincial level panel data from 2002 to 2010 we introduce a time transition function into the generalized quadratic almost ideal demand system gqaids to represent consumer preferences we apply this system to evaluate the demand structure for seven food groups the use of the gqaids specification relaxes many empirical demand system restrictions associated with previous analyses of structural preference change our findings suggest that chinese food preferences are continuing to evolve

demand elasticities for food products in brazil a two stage budgeting system the object of this article is to estimate demand elasticities for a basket of staple food important for providing the caloric needs of brazilian households these elasticities are useful in the measurement of the impact of structural reforms on poverty a two stage demand system was constructed based on data from household expenditure surveys pof produced by ibge the brazilian bureau of statistics in 1987 88 and 1995 96 we have used panel data to estimate the model and have calculated income own price and cross price elasticities for eight groups of goods and services and in the second stage for 11 sub groups of staple food products we estimated those elasticities for the whole sample of consumers and for two income groups

a globally flexible almost ideal demand system the almost ideal demand system is combined with the fourier expenditure system subject to the assumption that preferences are of the price independent generalized logarithmic class the resulting demand system has the desirable features of each of its components aggregate demand equations are consistent with preferences of a representative consumer and consistent estimates of elasticities are obtained for all observed prices application of the new demand system to u s consumption of meats and fish reveals that it fits the data well and that the restriction to the usual specification is rejected

statistical moments analysis of production and welfare in multi product cournot oligopoly abstract our context involves n cournot oligopolists producing m products at constant marginal costs when preferences are quasi linear we identify relationships between second moments of unit costs and second moments of firm level production for example a larger variance in unit costs of a product increases own output variance and the variance of any other output we also investigate how second moments of unit costs affect industry cost efficiency industry costs can rise if the wrong firm secures a cost reduction for quadratic preferences it is shown that zhao s zhao j 2001 a characterization for the negative welfare effects of cost reduction in cournot oligopoly international journal of industrial organization 19 455 469 3 4 march share criteria for an increase in unit costs to increase welfare extend to the multi product setting

generalized models of japanese demand for fish given a relative lack of knowledge about japanese consumer preferences for fish japanese fish demand is modeled using both marshallian ordinary and inverse demand systems each of which nests a number of competing specifications results indicate that the inverse demand systems dominate the ordinary demand systems in forecasting performance and in nonnested tests the inverse system suggests that japanese fish prices are less responsive to changes in consumption than found in previous studies

demand for red meat poultry and fish in morocco an almost ideal demand system there is a paucity of data and basic research needed for policy analysis in morocco subjective estimates for elasticities are currently used in making policy recommendations an almost ideal demand system model is used to estimate demand elasticities for beef mutton poultry and fish in morocco mutton is shown to be a luxury good reflecting moroccans preference for mutton demand is shown to be more elastic than has been assumed in some past policy analyses

econometric developments in agricultural and resource economics the first 100 years this article reviews the major contributions of agricultural and resource economists in the area of econometrics over the past 100 years early on a number of agricultural economists were in on the ground floor in terms of developing new econometric methods over time as the economics profession became more empirically oriented agricultural and resource economists increasingly assumed the role of early adopters of new econometric methods even so agricultural and resource economists continue to make useful modifications to econometric techniques in order to adapt the methods to the unique nature of the problems and applications that we study

a bayesian approach to aggregation in demand systems smoothing with perfect substitution priors demand analysis requires aggregation of commodities some are imposed at the data collection level leaving some for the estimation level when data are collected the implicit assumption underlying the aggregation is perfect substitutability one gallon of gasoline is viewed by consumers as equivalent to another gallon hence the two are added together while such aggregation can be carried out further by the data analyst it is difficult to incorporate perfect substitutability into the estimation of direct demand systems perfect substitution in that context implies discontinuous demand functions which are not nested within standard empirical demand systems perfect substitution is much more easily handled in a system of inverse demands though an empirical method to impose perfect substitutability in an inverse demand system has not previously appeared in the literature in this article we develop such a method which allows perfect substitutability to be imposed as a prior restriction we use leame

financial intermediation and endogenous growth an endogenous growth model with multiple assets is developed agents who face random future liquidity needs accumulate capital and a liquid but unproductive asset the effects of introducing financial intermediation into this environment are considered conditions are provided under which the introduction of intermediaries shifts the composition of savings toward capital causing intermediation to be growth promoting in addition intermediaries generally reduce socially unnecessary capital liquidation again tending to promote growth

weak separability and the estimation of elasticities in multistage demand systems the necessary conditions for multistage budgeting to be at least approximately justified are reviewed and the plausibility of these assumptions i e weak separability and low variability of price indices with utility level are discussed using no further assumptions simple relationships between expenditure and price elasticities in different budgeting levels are derived these results are applied to a three stage model for swedish food consumption and it is shown that the assumptions are not inappropriate restricting the analysis to the last stage of a multistage budgeting process is also shown to lead to considerable errors which could well have policy consequences

some evidence on the performance of size correction factors in testing consumer demand models abstract simulation experiments with the rotterdam model show that restricting the covariance matrix and using its unbiased estimate is quite helpful when performing the wald test while application of italianer s correction factor works quite well when using the likelihood ratio test

a generalized armington trade model respecification abstract even if the original version of the armington model is simple and plausible in estimation the single ces and homotheticity assumptions are too restrictive for practical application and give biased price elasticities this paper develops a generalized armington model which relaxes the single ces and homotheticity restrictions and includes the armington model as a special case the armington and generalized armington trade models are applied to the japanese meat import demand to demonstrate their performance the empirical results rejected the two assumptions imposed on the armington model the generalized armington model provides an alternative to the restrictive but indispensable armington model

demand for food fats and oils the role of demographic variables and government donations a systems model of u s food fats and oils demand is estimated using quarterly time series data for the period 1962 87 demographic scaling is used to incorporate demographic variables and per capita government butter donations in addition to price income and demographic demand elasticities dietary fat intake elasticities are calculated for each of the demographic characteristics included in the study all of the five own price elasticities are statistically significant as are fifteen of the twenty cross price elasticities fourteen of the fifteen demographic elasticities are statistically significant

an empirical assessment of endogeneity issues in demand analysis for differentiated products this article explores the issue of price and expenditure endogeneity in empirical demand analysis the analysis focuses on the u s carbonated soft drink market we test the null hypothesis that price and expenditures are exogenous in the demand for carbonated soft drinks using an almost ideal demand system aids specification we strongly reject exogeneity for both prices and expenditures we find that accounting for price expenditures endogeneity significantly impacts demand elasticity estimates we also evaluate the implications of endogeneity issues for testing weak separability over the last few decades strong linkages between economic theory and econometric methods have stimulated much empirical analysis of consumer behavior e g deaton and muellbauer 1980b the basic approach involves estimating marshallian demand functions expressing quantities consumed as functions of prices and household expenditures the usual practice is to treat prices and expenditure as exogenous variables in this article we question the validity of these exogeneity assumptions especially when focusing on the demand for differentiated products 1 this is particularly important to the extent that food consumption typically involves differentiated products in market economies we also examine the interactions between endogeneity of prices expenditure in demand systems and the testing for weak separability of consumer preferences

impacts of meat product recalls on consumer demand in the usa the impact of meat product recall events on consumer demand beef pork poultry and other consumption goods in the usa is tested empirically beef pork and poultry recall indices are constructed from both the food safety inspection service s meat recall events and from newspaper reports over the period 1982 1998 following previous product recall studies recall indices are incorporated as shift variables in consumers demand functions estimating an absolute price version of the rotterdam demand model findings indicate that food safety inspection service s meat recall events significantly impact demand and newspaper reports do not moreover although elasticities related to recall events are significant they are small in magnitude relative to price and income effects any favourable effects on the demands of meat substitutes for a recall are offset by a more general negative effect on meat demand the general negative effect indicates a shift out of meat to non meat consumption goods

evaluating prior beliefs in a demand system the case of meat demand in canada an almost ideal demand system for meats is estimated using canadian data a bayesian approach is used to impose inequality restrictions on substitution elasticities via monte carlo integration and importance sampling in order to conform with prior beliefs about curvature and monotonicity restrictions and substitution relationships results are more consistent with the concavity and monotonicity restrictions from demand theory than with the added restriction that all meats are substitutes

measuring and testing advertising induced rotation in the demand curve advertising can rotate the demand curve if it changes the dispersion of consumers valuations we provide an elasticity form measure of the advertising induced demand curve rotation in five demand models and test for its presence in the us nonalcoholic beverage market the almost ideal demand system aids model reveals that doubling advertising spending rotates the demand curves clockwise for milk and coffee and tea with associated slope changes of 7 and 12 soft drink advertising rotates its demand curve counterclockwise our policy suggestion is that milk and soft drink firms time advertising to coincide with high and low price periods respectively

the effect of expenditure aggregation on hypothesis tests in consumer demand systems in this paper cluster analysis is used to identify stochastic hicksian aggregates sha such aggregates comprise goods for which relative prices are constant up to a random element the need to identify such aggregates arises since inappropriate aggregation could influence subsequent estimation and tests results evidence is found that inappropriate aggregation of expenditures influences the outcome of hypothesis tests furthermore cluster analysis appears to identify goods which can be treated as sha it would thus appear that these methods should be used to identify the appropriate goods to aggregate prior to the estimation or testing of demand models

revisiting aggregate u s meat demand with a bayesian averaging of classical estimates approach do we need a more general theory although meat demand is one of the most studied issues in agricultural economics our understanding of this phenomenon has been hampered by valid concerns about model specification uncertainty this article revisits the need for more general theories of aggregate u s meat demand using a bayesian averaging of classical estimates approach we draw comprehensive inferences over 1 048 576 demand systems we find very little evidence supporting the need for more general theories that include demand determinants beyond prices and expenditures we find strong evidence in support of symmetry and negativity but strong evidence against homogeneity which is consistent with other research copyright 2008 oxford university press

financial sector development and growth in small open economies this article investigates the granger causal relationship between financial development and economic growth for four small open economies over the period 1960 to 2003 both long and short run granger causality tests are used to assess the finance growth nexus the results suggest that there is a positive association between financial development and growth in all countries however the long run causality tests show that growth tends to lead financial development in singapore and jamaica financial development leads growth in trinidad and tobago and there is a bidirectional link in barbados these results therefore suggest that cross country studies could overstate the impact of financial development on growth since they ignore differences even in relatively homogenous groups

maintaining and testing separability in demand systems we derive a general elasticity representation of the necessary and sufficient conditions for direct weak separability of the utility function parametric restrictions required to implement the separability conditions are presented for three common demand systems the almost ideal translog and rotterdam our empirical application uses the rotterdam model to test a few separable structures within a complete u s demand system emphasizing food commodities results based on size corrected likelihood ratio tests provide support for commonly used separability assumptions about food and meat demand

conceptual and functional form issues in estimating demand elasticities for food in estimating demand elasticities for food we must choose a functional form for the statistical model because this choice can have untoward consequences for the user king we seek a form which does not impose undue restrictions on the estimated demand elasticities statistically we seek a functional form which gives close approximations to the elasticities of interest in this connection gallant 1981 1982 points out that the key consideration is the method of approximation there are two taylor s series and fourier series methods the problem with taylor s theorem is that it applies only locally on a region of unspecified size this method can yield testable implications of the theory at the point of approximation but this point is in general unknown and may not even be in the range of the data caves and christensen white moreover the approximation error from taylor s series can be large for small departures from the unspecified point of expansion white in short there is nd guarantee that taylor s theorem will give close approximations at any point in the sample gallant 1981 thus there is no assurance that even the recently popularized locally flexible functional forms translog generalized leontief almost ideal demand system will give close approximations to the true demand system

are there halo effects of us grain export promotion the objective of the research reported in this article is to examine both the own and cross effects of us export promotion for us and non us grains we focus on two previously neglected dimensions of the cross effects first we examine whether a halo effect i e promotion for one us commodity positively effects demand for another us commodity for us commodities exists second we look at whether us grain export promotion has public goods characteristics that is does us grain promotion have a halo effect on grain demand for other countries we use a linear approximation of an almost ideal demand system la aids model for us and non us rice wheat and sorghum that include us export promotion as one of the explanatory variables our goal is to provide further empirical evidence for the halo effect issue by using us grains as a case study since this sector has not been previously explored in addition to estimating own and cross export promotion elasticities the magnitude of cross effects on us market s

household demand for convenience and nonconvenience foods states the budget shares are generally more responsive to prices than to real total expenditure additionally the quantities demanded of convenience and nonconvenience foods are generally more sensitive to changes in income and own prices than to changes in cross prices with regard to demographic variates primary users of convenience foods are white households with employed household managers less than 35 years of age

on price indices in the almost ideal demand system a number of papers have discussed the relationship between the almost ideal demand system aids and its linear approximation la aids in this paper it is shown that if the prices in the system are normalized to one the aids and la aids representations are identical at the point of normalization also at the point of normalization the expressions for price and expenditure elasticities from both systems are identical

financial development and economic growth international evidence the importance of the relationship between financial development and economic growth has been well recognized and emphasized in the field of economic development 1 although recent writings on this subject seem to accept the hypothesis that financial development is crucial for successful economic growth 2 patrick asked the critical question which sector financial or real leads in the dynamic process of economic development patrick identified two possible patterns in the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in the first growth induces an expansion of the financial system 3 according to this view called demand following the lack of financial growth is a manifestation of the lack of demand for financial services as the real side of the economy develops its demands for various new financial services materialize and these are met rather passively from the financial side in the second pattern the expansion of the financial system precedes the demand for its services channeling scarce resources from small savers to large investors according to relative rates of return the financial sector precedes and induces real growth the deliberate establishment and promotion of financial institutions in many less developed countries ldcs might reflect this belief in the supply leading relationship between the two developments a natural question then concerns the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth patrick asserted that the direction of causality changes over the course of development in his view financial development is able to induce real innovation type investment before sustained modern economic growth gets under way and as the process of real growth occurs the supply leading impetus gradually becomes less important and the demand following financial response

on inferring individual behaviour from market behaviour in a predetermined quantities model this article develops the theoretical basis of individual behaviour recovered from market behaviour in a predetermined quantities model as applied economists argue an inverse demand system may be empirically sound within the framework of classical demand theory however it should not lead to the conclusion that the market responses for changes in quantity should be used to see welfare effects instead of the individual responses by price changes as far as the market is concerned it shows theoretically and empirically how individual responses can be recovered from market responses in a predetermined quantities model it suggests that the fundamental results of this article should be used on interpreting empirical results from the predetermined quantities models

estimating a demand system with nonnegativity constraints mexican meat demand a new information based approach for estimating systems of many equations with nonnegativity constraints is presented this approach called generalized maximum entropy gme is more practical and

non parametric tests of consumer behaviour the neoclassical model of consumer behaviour postulates that a consumer s choice behaviour can be described as deriving from utility maximization subject to a budget constraint one is then naturally led to ask what this model implies about observed behaviour this question has been addressed from two quite distinct approaches the first approach originating in the work of slutsky 1915 and antonelli 1886 derives necessary and sufficient conditions involving the derivatives of the demand functions the second approach originating in the work of samuelson 1938 1947 1948 derives algebraic conditions on the demand functions implied by maximizing behaviour

habit formation and demand for sugar sweetened beverages using scanner data we estimated demand for nine nonalcoholic beverages under habit formation we found strong evidence for habit formation although demand for sugar sweetened beverages by low income households is less elastic to own price changes compared with high income households there is evidence that high income households consider beverages to be more substitutable than low income households do a half cent per ounce tax on store purchased sugar sweetened beverages will result in a moderate reduction in consumption of sugar sweetened beverages for both income strata because of habit formation long run national tax revenue from a sugar sweetened beverage tax is about 15 to 20 lower than short run revenue

game theoretic analysis of a bankruptcy problem from the talmud abstract for three different bankruptcy problems the 2000 year old babylonian talmud prescribes solutions that equal precisely the nucleoli of the corresponding coalitional games a rationale for these solutions that is independent of game theory is given in terms of the talmudic principle of equal division of the contested amount this rationale leads to a unique solution for all bankruptcy problems which always coincides with the nucleolus two other rationales for the same rule are suggested in terms of other talmudic principles needless to say the rule in question is not proportional division

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

applying theil s multinomial extension of the linear logit model to meat expenditure data one of the chief drawbacks of the multinomial extension of the linear logit model is that after the standard linearization the parameters which are directly estimated have no obvious economic meaning this paper presents alternative transformations which facilitate interpretation in one linearization the estimated coefficients will be elasticities at a selected data point such as the mean in another form the coefficients will be slutsky parameters the latter version is chosen for an empirical analysis of the demand for meat in great britain a number of issues concerning the model s error structure and dynamic specification are discussed

the demand for alcohol in the united kingdom using the aids model we show that there exists for the uk a stable long run relationship between expenditure shares on beer cider spirits and wine alcohol prices total alcohol expenditure and a range of non economic variables relating to advertising licensing the employment social class and demographic characteristics of consumers and climate our estimates of key price and income elasticities generally lie between those found from other time series studies which exclude most of these non economic variables and those found from cross section studies which generally include them however the restrictions required for separability homegeneity and symmetry although not those for perfect price aggregation are decisively rejected

a flexible multistage demand system based on indirect separability the notion of indirect separability is exploited to derive a new multistage demand system the model allows a consistent parameterization of demand relations at various budgeting stages and it fulfills the requirement of flexibility while satisfying separability globally two propositions are derived to characterize flexible and separable functional forms which lead to the specification of a flexible and separable translog fast demand system the model is particularly attractive for modeling large complete demand systems and is illustrated with an application

the inverse almost ideal demand system abstract a new demand system related to the almost ideal demand system aids of deaton and muellbauer is developed and illustrated this inverse aids iaids retains all of the desirable theoretical properties of the aids model with the exception of consistent aggregation an empirical issue is whether a linear approximation will work as well for the iaids as it has for the aids model since quantities are not as highly correlated as prices an application to u s meat demand demonstrates that the linear approximation of the iaids is excellent which enhanced the ease and range of application

an inverse demand analysis with introduction of quality effects an application to spanish consumption of fruit and vegetables this article analyzes consumer preference for fruit and vegetables when by using time series with socioeconomic characteristics of households there can be seemingly unobserved quality effects which are increased by aggregation the changes in spanish demand for fresh and processed fruit and vegetables over the period 1987 2000 are discussed following previous tests and analyses quantities are taken as predetermined and prices as matching the offer conditions thus quality effects based on the nutritional and or health value of the product are estimated from the error terms associated with the functions of the unit values quality variables are introduced as taste shifters in the inverse demand system laitinen theil model the results show the positive effects of quality differences on the normalized price for the group of products through own quality flexibilities and the negative effects between fresh and processed products through cross quality flexibilities

aggregation flexible forms and estimation of food consumption parameters reply grouping schemes commodity aggregation and the choice of functional specification significantly influence the results of empirical demand studies this article assesses the importance of these factors for estimating aggregate food consumption parameters a flexible food demand model that nests alternative specifications is estimated using u s data foods are aggregated based on a new grouping scheme adopted from the dietary guidelines for americans nutrient intake elasticities with respect to food prices and expenditure are calculated the influence of socioeconomic variables on consumption and nutrient intake is analyzed price income and demographic effects are found to be highly significant our findings are invariant to the choice of functional form

economic welfare analysis of policy induced structural change in the indonesian poultry industry abstract the performance of the poultry industry in indonesia is analyzed in terms of changes in producer and consumer welfare as a result of public policy intended to limit the size of production units in order to distribute growth opportunities to smaller farms elasticities of supply and demand are estimated using the seemingly unrelated system of equations the hypothesis of a policy induced structural change estimated through a dummy variable accounting for a shift in supply associated with implementation of the policy shows a negative impact on the output supplied and the welfare of producers and consumers to the tune of about rp 94 billion or roughly about 0 1 of national income as of 1983 the study suggests an important trade off between more equitable income distribution and economic efficiency

an error correction almost ideal demand system for meat in greece this paper represents a dynamic specification of the almost ideal demand system aids based on recent developments on cointegration techniques and error correction models based on greek meat consumption data over the period 1958 1993 it was found that the proposed formulation performs well on both theoretical and statistical grounds as the theoretical properties of homogeneity and symmetry are supported by the data and the lechatelier principle holds regardless of the time horizon beef and chicken may be considered as luxuries while mutton lamb and pork as necessities in the short run beef was found to have price elastic demand pork an almost unitary elasticity whereas mutton lamb chicken and sausages had inelastic demands in the long run beef and pork were found to have a demand elasticity greater than one whereas mutton lamb chicken and sausages still had inelastic demands all meat items are found to be substitutes to each other except chicken and mutton lamb and pork and chicken

sharing a fish resource bioeconomic analysis of an applied allocation rule political and economic factors usually determine the harvest sharesallotted to heterogeneous fisher groups harvesting upon the same fishstock given that the fishers harvest upon different segments of a fishstock with for instance cannibalistic tendencies the shares allottedmay have considerable effect upon the well being of the stock and theeconomics of the fishery this paper analyses an existing allocationrule defining harvest shares allotted to two vessel groups trawlers andcoastal vessels in the norwegian cod fishery we apply a model with twointeracting age groups within a single fish stock where the interactionhas both biological and economic implications requiring a first bestapproach to an optimal stock size results in no harvest in the firstyears studied in order to ensure harvest amounts close to the historicharvest we design a second best model giving optimal biological sharesin the build up phase of the stock and bioeconomic optimal shares atthe optimum fish stock level the second best model recommends that foran increasing stock size the trawlers should obtain decreasing shares we find that the actual allocation rule functions in a manner oppositeto the second best model since this rule allocates an increasing shareto the trawlers for an increasing stock size

the peculiar rationality of beef import quotas in japan in recent years economists have devoted considerable effort towards explaining why governments protect certain domestic industries from import competition anderson and baldwin so far however little attention has been directed at explaining the choice of protective policy instrument why for example are import quotas rather than less distortionary production subsidies or tariffs used an especially interesting case is provided by east asian beef protection policies import quotas in japan and south korea have ensured that beef prices in these countries are several times higher than import prices saxon and anderson anderson a major reason for protecting the beef sector is to boost domestic livestock producers incomes the first best policy instrument for achieving this objective namely income supplements is said to be politically impracticable because of its budgetary cost there is however a second best policy which may harm domestic consumers less than the present policy without reducing returns to beef producers or drawing on general tax revenue this policy involves replacing import quotas with a less restrictive tariff and or levy on imports and using the tariff levy revenue to subsidize the domestic producer price up to its present quota protected level such a change in beef import policy has been advocated for japan by a number of authors in recent years forum for policy innovation hayami longworth 1976 1978 hayami s analysis suggests that all parties would benefit from a partial trade liberalization of this sort if such a policy change is so beneficial why does japan continue with restrictive import quotas and why are other countries such as south korea following the japanese example in fact the recommended policy is to some extent already in place japan s beef imports are subject to a 25 tariff in addition the government monopoly importing agency imposes a levy on imports which is used in part to support feeder calf prices the question then becomes to what extent is further liberalization possible without reducing beef producer protection or drawing on treasury funds the theory section below shows that the answer depends on whether none some or all existing government programs being financed by rents from imports are assumed to continue the second section looks empirically at the likely extent to which consumer beef prices in japan could fall in each of these cases and at the effects of such reductions as compared with both the present situation and free trade in the light of these results the third section suggests a number of reasons for the persistence of quotas

the poultry market demand stability and industry structure the stability of the demand for poultry meat and specification issues in its estimation are explored the analysis concludes that the demand for poultry meat shifted out in the early 1970s at the same time the demand relationship between poultry and pork changed from substitution to independence a second conclusion is that poultry price is predetermined for demand in annual u s data while quantity is not a predetermined price suggests several market structures exogeneity tests are performed to distinguish among them the results are consistent with a competitive constant returns to scale industry facing elastic factor supplies

financial development growth and the distribution of income a paradigm is presented in which both the extent of financial intermediation and the rate of economic growth are endogenously determined financial intermediation promotes growth because it allows a higher rate of return to be earned on capital and growth in turn provides the means to implement costly financial structures thus financial intermediation and economic growth are inextricably linked in accord with the goldsmith mckinnon shaw view on economic development the model also generates a development cycle reminiscent of the kuznet hypothesis in particular in the transition from a primitive slow growing economy to a developed fast growing one a nation passes through a stage in which the distribution of wealth across the rich and poor widens

aids translog and the gorman polar form abstract all budget share models that are linear in the log of income can be derived from gorman polar form subutility functions implications of this result for two stage budgeting lifetime utility maximization and social welfare calculations are discussed

demand for dairy products in the eu abstract in the eu dairy sector given the remaining high protective tariffs and the quota system the main factor that drives dairy product market prices is the demand this paper evaluates the development of demand in the eu and presents estimates of consumption trends and forecasts for the future as well as estimates of elasticity with respect to prices and income in two major eu consumer countries france and italy we use two methods to estimate the development of demand for dairy products one based on a multi stage demand system and another based on a single trend equation the two methods generally lead to the same qualitative results but trend projections are larger using the demand system approach which is based on a shorter data period this difference is thus partly explained by the fact that high trend projections are not sustainable over a long period the results show a decreasing consumption of butter and fluid milk and an overall growth in protein and fat consumption nevertheless the increase in fat consumption should be more moderate than the consumption of protein the results also show that the demand for dairy products is relatively price inelastic but is more sensitive to changes in income especially for butter and cheese categories as shown by the use of a partial equilibrium model of dairy markets the likely impact of the cap reform strongly depends on the development of demand for dairy products in the eu more research effort on demand analysis is therefore crucial in order to assess the impact of reforms or trade negotiations more accurately and effectively

measuring the welfare effects of nutrition information cost benefit analysis justifies regulations altering the amount of health related information presented to consumers the current method of benefit analysis the cost of avoided illness is limited it assumes the benefits of health related information are adequately represented by changes in illnesses the manuscript develops a benefit estimation method to measure the welfare impacts of providing nutrient information nutrient labeling significantly affects purchase behaviour but may not lead to increased consumption of health foods nutrient labeling may increase welfare without any change in health risk thus the cost of avoided illness approach can underestimate the social benefits of providing nutrient information copyright 2001 oxford university press

restoring a fish stock a dynamic bankruptcy problem total allowable catch tac regulating schemes have been introduced in most fisheries tac distribution following the proportional rule based on historical catches implies that harvesters or vessel groups that have captured more in the past and contributed to overfishing are getting larger quotas than groups that have contributed less to overfishing in contrast to this rule a more egalitarian rule the constrained equal award rule is proposed for distributing the tac contingent upon the fishing techniques used by the harvesters it is demonstrated how the fish stock recovery period harvest and profitability may vary according to these two rules

the economic value of improvements in beef tenderness by genetic marker selection a genetic simulation model is combined with an economic model of the u s beef industry to determine how consumer demand shifts resulting from bull and heifer selection strategies that improve steak tenderness affect economic profitability at four points in the beef supply chain the results indicate that a selection strategy in which bulls in the upper 30 of genetic merit are selected each year would result in increased profitability of 9 60 head for feeder cattle and 1 23 head for fed cattle in 20 years the net present value of the genetic improvement program is estimated to produce economic benefits of 7 6 billion

a model of regulated open access resource use abstract this paper develops a model of regulated open access resource exploitation the regulatory model assumes that regulators are goal oriented choosing target harvest levels according to a safe stock concept these harvest quotas are implemented by setting season lengths conditioned on the industry fishing capacity the industry enters until rents are dissipated conditioned on season length regulations harvest levels fishing capacity season length and biomass are determined jointly using parameter estimates from the long regulated north pacific halibut fishery predictions of these variables from the regulated open access model are compared to predictions that arise from the gordon model

implicit separability characterisation and implications for consumer demands abstract we characterize a general form of separability which we call implicit separability it is more general than all known types of separability and contains them as special cases we provide complete characterisations in terms of the direct preference ordering its dual expenditure function the demand functions and the slutsky

does food safety information impact u s meat demand a theoretical model of consumer response to publicized food safety information on meat demand is developed with an empirical application to u s meat consumption evidence is found for the existence of pre committed levels of consumption seasonal factors time trends and contemporaneous own and cross commodity food safety concerns the average demand response to food safety concerns is small especially in comparison to price effects and to previous estimates of health related issues this small average effect masks periods of significantly larger responses corresponding with prominent food safety events but these larger impacts are short lived with no apparent food safety lagged effects on food safety concerns in the united states have dramatically increased in the past decade with regard to incidences of contaminated meat products concerns have arisen because contaminated meat products can result in serious risk to the well being and health of consumers contamination comes from a myriad of sources including but not limited to outbreaks of listeria monocytogenes escherichia coli e coli and salmonella centers for disease control and prevention food safety problems are not isolated to the united states as other unsafe contaminates in meats have emerged across the world including highly publicized outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy bse in europe the potential impacts of publicized food safety events on consumer s demand for meat products in the united states include own effects on the demand for the contaminated meat involved as well as cross effects impacting the demand for other meats the objective of this article is to investigate whether publicized food safety concerns surrounding beef pork and poultry chicken and turkey have impacted meat consumption food safety indices are constructed separately for beef pork and poultry

the demand for assets and optimal monetary aggregation this paper uses a highly disaggregated demand system to estimate the degree of substitutability among monetary assets and to address the issue of optimal monetary aggregation in the united states we address the problems of dimensionality and nonlinearity estimating a very detailed monetary asset demand system encompassing the full range of assets based on the locally flexible normalized quadratic expenditure function we treat the concavity property as a maintained hypothesis and provide evidence consistent with neoclassical microeconomic theory statistical tests reject the appropriateness of the aggregation assumptions for all the money measures published by the federal reserve as well as for a large number of groupings suggested by earlier studies this supports and reinforces barnett s 2016 assertion that we should employ the broadest m4 monetary aggregate published by the center for financial stability

testing restrictions on a model of japanese meat demand tests for quasi separability net substitutability and perfect substitutability are developed and implemented on an almost ideal demand system model of the japanese meat sector the data set satisfies both symmetry and homogeneity there is evidence of net complimentarity between chicken and dairy beef and chicken and pork the tests indicate that japanese wagyu beef is considered a separate commodity to both imported beef and dairy beef the results also indicate that fish can be treated as separable in the japanese meat demand system

prices poaching and protein alternatives an analysis of bushmeat consumption around serengeti national park tanzania abstract the consumption of meat from wild animals or bushmeat occurs throughout africa and highlights the conflict between two distinct development goals food security and biodiversity conservation growing human populations throughout the greater serengeti ecosystem rely heavily on bushmeat as a source of protein which places pressure on migratory wildlife populations this paper uses unique data from protein consumption surveys from 131 households over 34 months in a generalizable empirical framework to estimate price cross price and expenditure elasticities of protein sources and analyze the potential economic effects of policies to mitigate bushmeat hunting and consumption results suggest that 1 directly increasing the price of bushmeat through enforcement or other policies to reduce supply will have the most direct and largest effect of bushmeat consumption 2 increasing income increases bushmeat consumption as well as consumption of other meat sources 3 if surrounding fisheries experience a negative shock or collapse this will lead to a dramatic increase in bushmeat consumption overall these results strongly indicate that policies to reduce bushmeat hunting while maintaining food security must be considered in a broad and comprehensive framework

the allocation of co2 emissions as a claims problem abstract in the context of multilateral negotiations on climate change this paper proposes to use the claims approach as a reasonable and practicable alternative in order to allocate the admissible co2 emissions per region the proposed methodology entails analyze the application of a broad group of theoretical solutions through the establishment of equity and stability criteria to this regard the empirical analyzing combines several co2 world endowments from meinshausen et al 2009 together with claims forecasts associated with the rcp representative concentration pathways scenarios the results obtained indicate that the constrained equal awards and minimal solutions are clearly equity sensitive given that the co2 emission reduction imposed by the constrained equal awards solution on asia and the oecd are very important and considering the better balance between equity and proportionality associated with the min solution it could be that this latter solution would be the most practicable and acceptable

modelling us tourism demand for european destinations abstract an almost ideal demand system model is used to examine us demand for tourism in european destinations the model provides policy makers with useful information concerning the sensitivity of tourism demand to changes in relative prices exchange rates and expenditure the results show that price competitiveness is important for us demand for france italy and spain but is relatively unimportant for the uk france and italy are regarded as substitutes by us tourists as are spain and italy as us expenditure rises the market shares of spain and the uk decline while france and italy benefit the demand modelling and forecasting indicate that in the absence of a tourism price index the choice between alternative price indices does not have a significant effect on the results

a new market for an old food the u s demand for olive oil while u s consumption of olive oil has tripled over the past two decades nearly all olive oil continues to be imported estimation of a demand system using monthly import data reveals that the income elasticity for virgin oils sourced from eu is above one but demand for nonvirgin oils is income inelastic the demand for olive oil as a single product is price inelastic differentiated by product characteristic and origin olive oils are highly substitutable with each other but not with other vegetable oils news about the health and culinary benefits of olive oil and the spread of mediterranean diet contribute significantly to the rising demand

testing restrictions in a flexible dynamic demand system an application to consumers expenditure in canada traditionally restrictions on systems of demand equations have been tested using static models whilst being estimated with time series data this paper develops a vector time series model of expenditure shares in the context of a singular dynamic demand system the model allows for non symmetric and non homogeneous short run behaviour the homogeneity and symmetry restrictions are only examined in the long run structure results based on canadian time series data are presented and reject the current practise of static modelling while restrictions suggested by economic theory are not rejected when imposed on the long run structure

elasticities in aids models in the literature a variety of approaches have been used to calculate demand elasticities in almost ideal demand system aids models of demand it is common to estimate the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids instead of the aids when the la aids is estimated all of the previously reported approaches to compute elasticities are theoretically incorrect this paper presents correct formulas for la aids elasticities and illustrates the potential errors from using incorrect computing the almost ideal demand system aids of deaton and muellbauer 1980a b has become popular in recent years anderson and blundell blanciforti and green 1983a b blanciforti green and king chalfant eales and unnevehr fujii khaled and mak fulponi heien and willett murray parsons ray a variety of approaches to computing elasticities has been used and some of the approaches may lead to significant errors this paper clarifies the differences between alternative approaches to estimating demand elasticities in aids models

accounting for changes in tastes health concerns are thought by many to have shifted consumption away from red meats though econometric evidence is mixed testing for structural change is difficult especially when one time series is used for both estimating demand equations and testing their stability specification errors may suggest a shift where none has occurred using nonparametric demand analysis we find that meat consumption patterns in the united states and australia can be explained using only relative prices and expenditures only imposing particular functional forms can reverse the conclusion suggesting that specification errors in econometric demand studies can account for findings of taste changes

characteristics and hedonic pricing of differentiated beef demands we estimate a cbs system model of u s derived demand for meat we use this model 1 to examine relationships between three quality categories of beef and three other meats and 2 to simulate how taste shifts have affected demands for meats over time we extend previous studies by disaggregating wholesale beef production into three quality categories 1 usda choice grade or higher 2 usda select or lower and 3 cow and bull beef innovative features of our empirical model include a breakout of table cuts into choice and select and the use of a hedonic characterization of the two breakouts to value choice ness and beef ness our model demonstrates important shifts in separate demands for choice and select beef we show that separately the demand for choice grade beef declined in the 1980s and 1990s and the demand for select beef increased a departure from the relatively stable demand characterizations of more aggregated measures of combined choice and select beef jel classification q11 q13

correcting for measurement error in food demand estimation use of disappearance data as proxies for actual consumption causes inconsistent estimates of own price retail demand elasticities a system of equations describing consumer processor and producer behavior is used to consistently estimate the retail demand elasticity for beef using available data while avoiding the restrictive assumption of fixed input proportions implicit in disappearance data this approach yields an estimate of the own price retail demand elasticity for beef of 0 45 which is more inelastic than the estimate 0 66 obtained using a traditional approach the methodology is applicable to other food commodities for which disappearance data serve as proxies for actual consumption copyright 1993 by mit press

whither armington trade models the armington trade model distinguishes commodities by country of origin and import demand is determined in a separable two step procedure this framework has been applied to numerous international agricultural markets with the objective of modeling import demand in addition computable general equilibrium cge models commonly employ the armington formulation in the trade linkage equations the purpose of this paper is to test the armington assumptions of homotheticity and separability with data from the international cotton and wheat markets both parametric and nonparametric tests were performed and the empirical results reject the armington assumptions this has important implications for international trade modeling and cge modeling

market integration efficiency of arbitrage and imperfect competition methodology and application to u s celery this paper develops and applies a methodology to test for efficiency of interregional commodity arbitrage application of the methodology requires only time series data on prices for alternative cities regions countries or product forms yet the approach is capable of generating evidence on a number of market parameters including market integration arbitrage efficiency the magnitude of marketing margins product substitutability and competitiveness of markets estimation is based on a switching regression model with three regimes efficient arbitrage relative shortage and relative glut results from application of the model to u s celery marketing indicated significant departures from efficient arbitrage for both california and florida celery

comparing heterogeneous consumption in u s and japanese meat and fish demand this article uses national quarterly data to conduct an empirical analysis of pre committed meat and fish demand by u s and japanese households using the generalized almost ideal demand system gaids pre committed demand represents the component of demand that is insensitive to both income and price adjustments u s consumers are found to hold significant positive pre committed demand for beef and pork while japanese consumers appear to possess significant positive pre committed demand for beef and fish this provides evidence to partially explain observed differences in japanese and u s consumer reactions to nonprice and nonincome effects in beef pork poultry and fish in addition based on inand out of sample performance the more general gaids is preferred to the almost ideal demand system aids for both the u s and japanese demand systems results lend to improved demand modeling efforts and more complete understanding of true market forces at hand in meat and fish markets for these culturally diverse consumer groups

has the finance growth link been broken panel data evidence from latin america and the caribbean abstract this paper examines the two way relationship between economic growth and financial development for latin america and the caribbean lac the sample consists of 32 emerging and developing countries from lac spanning the period 1970 2014 controlling for country and time fixed effects the first central finding indicates that financial development is not a significant factor driving economic growth the evidence suggests however that larger government has a robust and significant effect on economic growth the second key finding is that the effect of economic growth on financial development is not significantly different from zero together these two main findings indicate that the finance growth link in lac has been broken over the 1970 2014 period the empirical results inform economic debates in lac and highlight the importance of public policy to improve the finance growth relationship

incorporating nutrients into meat demand analysis using household budgets data the objective of this article is to analyze the spanish demand for meat taking into account the consumer s concern about the relationship between food diet and health this concern is forcing food demand analysts to assume that consumer utility is a function of nutrients instead of simply the food products themselves nevertheless these utility function arguments are not produced in the marketplace but rather at home as a consequence in this article household production theory is followed in order to analyze spanish demand for meat using the quarterly national expenditure survey for 1999 demands for several meat products the input in the model are derived from the translog cost function censored regression models are used in the estimation process since many zero responses are reported five broad categories eight nutrients and the most relevant socioeconomic variables are considered finally a set of elasticities is calculated with respect to all the variables included in the analysis

financial liberalization financial sector development and growth evidence from malaysia abstract the objective of this paper is to examine whether financial development leads to economic growth or vice versa in the small open economy of malaysia using time series data from 1960 to 2001 we conduct cointegration and causality tests to assess the finance growth link by taking the real interest rate and financial repression into account the empirical evidence suggests that financial liberalization through removing the repressionist policies has a favorable effect in stimulating financial sector development financial depth and economic development are positively related but contrary to the conventional findings our results support robinson s view that output growth leads to higher financial depth in the long run

using elasticities from an almost ideal demand system watch out for group expenditure group expenditure has often been treated as exogenous when estimating demand parameters for a group of commodities with an almost ideal demand system researchers draw demand elasticities from past literature to use in their own analysis but elasticities contingent on exogenous group expenditure may be inappropriate here the approach is considered in the case of japanese meat demand with a simple equation added to estimate group expenditures the results show that elasticities should be revised and that a group expenditure equation is not a panacea as it may result in the violation of theoretical restrictions such as symmetry

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

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fishing technology and optimal distribution of harvest rates this paper examines the problem of the optimal management of a joint ownership fishing exploitation where agents use different fishing gears we consider a model in which the fishing activity may affect resource growth not only through the harvest function but also through the natural growth rate of the resource this allows us to capture the fact that some fishing gears alter the natural growth rate of the resource we find that when the natural growth of the resource is altered by the fishing technology the optimal stock is not independent of how harvest quotas are distribute among the agents as a result a fishing policy that firstly determines the optimum stock and secondly decides how to distribute the harvest among the different agents will not be efficient we also analyze the joint determination of optimal stock and harvest quotas and show that positive harvest quotas will only be optimal when countries are characterized by certain asymmetries