the effects of differential mortality rates on the progressivity of social security does the old age and survivors insurance portion of social security become regressive once we allow for the shorter lifespan of poor people this paper compares the net returns of poor households to the net returns of other households after taking into account differential longevity earnings and social security tax and benefit histories are simulated for u s families of various income levels in the 1925 birth cohort these tax and benefit profiles are then weighted by the agents probabilities of survival for some plausible values of key mortality parameters differences in mortality eliminate the progressive spread in returns across income categories excerpt

energy efficiency and productivity change of china s iron and steel industry accounting for undesirable outputs abstract this paper used data from 50 enterprises in china s iron and steel industry to evaluate their energy efficiency and productivity change the study first used a conventional data envelopment analysis model and the malmquist productivity index mpi to measure the energy efficiency and productivity change over the period 2001 2008 the results indicated inefficiency in many of the plants the average energy efficiency was only 61 1 the annual growth rate of productivity was 7 96 over this period and technical change was the main contributor to this growth the research then took undesirable outputs into consideration by using the malmquist luenberger productivity index mlpi to explore the productivity change from 2006 to 2008 omitting undesirable outputs would result in biased efficiency change and technical change this paper also claimed that environmental regulation has a potentially positive impact on technical change

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

measuring the efficiency of european railways this paper is concerned with the definition and measurement of efficiency in a public body specifically railways the authors argue against commonly used measures such as profit and labour productivity in favour of a production possibility frontier approach physical measures of input and output are derived and applied using a variety of methodologies results from some of the most popular such as data envelopment analysis and corrected ordinary least squares using the translog function are shown to be potentially misleading two original approaches one using uniform efficiency distributions and the other applying bayesian state space techniques are developed and applied but these too are found to be potentially unreliable comparison with results from other authors finally lead to the conclusion that accurate measurement of efficiency is not possible although the research is able to indicate good and bad performers the final conclusion is that efficiency on the railway is a product primarily of go

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

climate change policy what do the models tell us very little a plethora of integrated assessment models iams have been constructed and used to estimate the social cost of carbon scc and evaluate alternative abatement policies these models have crucial flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis certain inputs e g the discount rate are arbitrary but have huge effects on the scc estimates the models produce the models descriptions of the impact of climate change are completely ad hoc with no theoretical or empirical foundation and the models can tell us nothing about the most important driver of the scc the possibility of a catastrophic climate outcome iam based analyses of climate policy create a perception of knowledge and precision but that perception is illusory and misleading jel c51 q54 q58

potential sources of productivity growth within chinese industry abstract this paper presents an approach for modeling and estimating potential sources of productivity growth within four major sectors of chinese industry the state and collective sectors and heavy and light industry the findings based upon industrial data from293 chinese counties indicate that substantial productivity gains can be achieved by transferring technology from the state to the collective sector exploiting enterprise and agglomerative scale economies and reallocating investment and labor to take advantage of large disparities between factor returns among the sectors the implications for the results of several idiosyncracies of chinese industrial prices and data are examined

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

the redistributive impact of the general old age pensions act on lifetime income in the netherlands by means of a simple simulation model we will look at the effect of the general old age pensions act on the distribution of lifetime income in the netherlands in spite of the fact that premiums are proportional to income whereas benefits are only dependent on marital status married or unmarried 1 the redistribution of income is rather limited this is especially true for the vertical income redistribution within a generation this is caused by differences in mortality rates and differences in the duration of working life between income groups

the effects of differential income replacement and mortality on u s social security redistribution we study redistribution via the u s social security retirement system for cohorts of men born during the second half of the 20th century our focus is on redistribution across race and education groups the cohorts we study are younger than cohorts studied in previous similar research and thus more exposed to recent increases in earnings inequality all else equal this should increase the degree of progressivity of social security redistribution due to the structure of the benefit formula however we find that redistribution is only modestly progressive for individuals born as late as 1980 differential mortality rates across race and education groups are the primary explanation while black white mortality gaps have narrowed some in recent years they remain large and dull progressivity mortality gaps by education level are also large and unlike the gaps by race they are widening which puts additional regressive pressure on social security redistribution

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

financial liberalisation and growth in china s economic reform this paper summarises china s financial liberalisation experience and examines the contributions of financial resources on economic growth during the post reform period financial liberalisation has resulted in the reallocation of the four sources of total investment in fixed assets state budget appropriation national bank loans self raised funds and foreign investment we find that the growth of gdp and industrial production are positively related to the growth of self raised funds and foreign investment we conclude that the use of foreign investment and funds raised by the enterprises themselves are more efficient than the government s appropriation and provision of bank loans

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

financial control in the transition from classical socialism to a market economy the transition from socialism to capitalism poses severe problems of financial management that have yet to be resolved in principle let alone in practice one unfortunate consequence is continual financial turmoil as socialist economies of the soviet union and eastern europe attempt reform inflation either open or repressed first accompanies and then undermines attempts to decentralize decision making to dampen inflation and prevent economic chaos even reform governments may be provoked to reintervene by seizing the financial assets of enterprises reinstituting price controls or commandeering outputs through state orders and similar devices but why should the transition from central planning to a market economy be inflationary understanding the system of financial control in the preexisting regime of classical socialism is the key to understanding what might go wrong in the transition under classical socialism all the means of production industrial and agricultural are state owned output targets input levels wages and prices are all set by a stalinist system of central planning accordingly i shall first identify 1 how domestic fiscal and monetary processes interact with and complement central planning in the classical socialist economy and then discuss 2 why this mechanism for securing domestic financial control and avoiding inflation under classical socialism tends to break down when decentralization begins and central planning is weakened the discussion will then turn to 3 how in a more deliberate transition domestic tax and monetary arrangements might be managed to keep the average price level stable as the market prices of individual goods and services become free to fluctuate after sufficient domestic financial control is secured

estimation of technical inefficiency in manufacturing industry an extension of the method of estimation of technical ineficiency is presented based on the stochastic production frontier approach a derivation of the estimation procedure is given and the technique applied at the industry level the choice of production function is considered and empirical results pertaining to australia and the uk are presented

environmental services as a strategy for sustainable development in rural amazonia abstract rural amazonians especially indians extractivists and other forest dwellers desperately need something that they can sell sale of material commodities taken from the rainforest is the focus of most attempts to encourage sustainable development for these populations but the mother lode waiting to be tapped is not a material commodity but rather the forest s environmental services converting services like biodiversity maintenance carbon storage and water cycling into monetary flows that can support a population of forest guardians requires crossing a series of hurdles reliable quantification of the magnitude of services being offered is a first necessity how to convert forest environmental services into an income stream and how to convert this stream into a foundation for sustainable development in rural amazonia is a great challenge effort should be focused on tapping environmental services as a long term strategy for maintaining both rainforest and its population in addition to progressing toward long term goals immediate measures are needed to support the population and to avoid further loss of forest

the transition to a market economy pitfalls of partial reform we present a theory of a partial economic reform of a planned economy similar to the one that took place in russia since 1988 and in china earlier in such a reform some markets are liberalized in the sense that producers can sell output to whomever they want including private firms at free prices but at the same time must sell to state firms at state prices we show that such a reform can result in a substantial diversion of subsidized inputs away from state firms and toward private firms even when state firms value these inputs more the result may be a reduction of total output the simple analysis sheds light on many consequences of the soviet reform such as breakdown of coordination of production increased state policing of delivery quotas prohibitions of trading cooperatives and opposition to privatization the model also explains why partial reform failed in russia but worked in china

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

how to reform a planned economy lessons from china the countries of eastern europe and the former soviet union have been flooded with advice from the west on how to liberalize their planned econo mies this advice is unfortunately offered in an empirical vacuum no one knows how these econo mies will react to the proposed liberalization meas ures there exists however a neglected source of information china offers a long time series of data over a decade s worth on the effects of reforms on a planned economy china s reforms were gradual but their cumulative effect has been large and they have been remarkably successful china s experiments provide some practical les sons on what kinds of reforms can work elsewhere the dominant school of thought among economists favours the big bang policy of reforming quickly and according to a comprehensive plan partial reforms in this view are useless they will be negated by the remnants of the planning system the proponents of big bang reform have been influential with poland czechoslovakia and rus sia announcing plans for a rapid transition to capi talism

the impact of china s economic reforms on agricultural productivity growth this paper presents a method for assessing the relative importance of price increases and strengthened individual incentives due to the introduction of the responsibility system for the post 1978 increase in china s agricultural productivity data on post 1978 chinese agricultural performance suggest that a little over three quarters of the measured productivity increase is due to payment system changes and the remainder to price increases we also use our method to calculate incentive indices giving an estimate of the fraction of their marginal product that peasants received under the pre 1978 regime

the total economic value of amazonian deforestation 1978 1993 national income accounting has been criticized because of its failure to encompass the notion of sustainability several studies address this problem through green income accounting i e by adjusting conventionally measured gdp for reduction in a given country s stock of natural resources these studies generally base value on the unit net price of the resource other studies go beyond net price emphasizing a natural resource s total economic value tev that is its non marketable as well as its marketable values this paper combines the green income accounting and tev approaches and applies the new framework to brazil in order to assess the foregone economic benefits resulting from amazonian deforestation the results lend support to calls for greater policy emphasis on conservation of unique and irreplaceable ecosystems 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

making the transition to prepaid medicare the medicare system is facing a financial crisis brought on by a combination of factors 1 a financing system that relies on intergenerational transfers from workers to the elderly as its major source of revenue 2 a payment scheme that traditionally has provided neither the demand nor the supply side of the market with strong incentives to hold down costs and 3 the penchant of congress to expand the coverage of the system over time every time a worthy cause or group can be identified the expansion of medicare benefits began almost immediately after the passage of the legislation in 1967 just one year after medicare had passed congress increased the number of days of in patient hospital care covered by the program in 1972 payment for the services of interns and residents in podiatry training was added to the benefit package also medicare coverage was extended to disabled persons under age 65 who were eligible for benefits under social security or railroad retirement and to certain other individuals under age 65 suffering end stage renal disease later medicare benefits were extended to state and local government employees not covered by social security and then coverage was extended to spouses of workers who were not yet covered but would be eligible to be covered in 1980 unlimited home health visits were covered as was the use of alcohol detoxification facilities in 1985 medicare provided payment for liver transplant services 1 there is current political pressure to

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

on measuring economic efficiency summary this paper considers a system consisting of a production frontier and factor share equations to measure firm specific technical efficiency and input specific allocative efficiency simultaneously in estimating the system as a whole the joint distribution of all errors in the equations is used this is more efficient than using the marginal distribution of a function of the errors as one does by estimating either the profit function or the production function alone the workability of the method is illustrated by applying it to farm level data from philippines agriculture

growth efficiency and convergence in china s state and collective industry in china as in the soviet union and eastern europe economic reform initiatives seek to increase productivity by introducing elements of market oriented policies and institutions into an economy formerly dominated by state planning efforts to evaluate the impact of reform of chinese industry have focused on the measurement of productivity change in state enterprises this study expands the prior framework of analysis in several directions our investigation of productivity trends is not limited to state enterprises but includes quantitative comparisons with china s fast growing collective industries which contributed 36 of overall industrial output in 1988 1 unlike previous studies our analysis works with gross rather than net output this permits us to investigate changes in the productivity of intermediate inputs which occupy a large portion of total costs in chinese industry as well as labor and capital to do this we develop a quasi frontier estimation procedure which seems appropriate for comparisons of total factor productivity based on chinese industrial data finally we offer a quantitative perspective on the extent to which reform efforts have moved industrial resource allocation toward patterns expected of a market system the analysis confirms our previous finding based on a restricted framework employing only labor fixed capital and net output that multifactor productivity in state industry has risen substantially during

journey for green development transformation of china s metal industry a spatial econometric analysis abstract the metal industry mi in china is energy and emissions intensive this paper tries to provide guidance for the green development transformation of china s mi by investigating the green total factor productivity gtfp and its influencing factors using a global data envelopment analysis and a spatial tobit regression model the estimation results show that 1 from 2000 to 2015 gtfp of china s mi enjoyed a considerable improvement however the current value of gtfp of china s mi is still less than 0 5 indicating that gtfp of china s mi is far from efficient 2 the spatial correlation test shows that gtfps of china s provincial mis have positive spatial correlations most of the provinces scattered in high high and low low agglomerations 3 gtfp of china s mi is significantly positive related to the degree of marketization fiscal decentralization environmental regulation industrial scale is significantly negative related to resources endowment and product structure and has u shaped relationship with the level of economic development the above results suggest that china already has made remarkable achievements in promoting green development of its mi however there is much room for further improvement policy options for the green development transformation of china s mi include but are not limited to promoting market oriented and financial system reforms strengthening environmental supervision and optimizing industrial scale and product structure finally recommendations for the effective implementation of these policies are provided at the end of the study

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

rural reforms and agricultural growth in china this paper employs province level panel data to assess the contributions of decollectivization price adjustments and other reforms to china s agricultural growth in the reform period decollectivization is found to improve total factor productivity and to account for about half of the output growth during 1978 84 the adjustment in state procurement prices also contributed positively to output growth its impact came mainly from the responses in input use the effect of other market related reforms on productivity and output growth was very small reasons for slowdown in agricultural growth after 1984 are also analyzed copyright 1992 by american economic association

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

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

did the technical efficiency of state enterprises improve with the same speed in all provinces in china the objectives of this study are to examine whether technical efficiency of china s state enterprises improved over time due to the impact of economic reforms and to examine whether the response rates varied significantly across provinces the results carry strong policy implications for future reforms the empirical results show that technical efficiency improved significantly due to economic reforms from 1986 to 1989 shanghai appears to have responded more quickly and consistently to economic reforms than other provinces over the period

productive performance in west german manufacturing industry 1970 80 a farrell frontier characterisation some measure of the success with which economic resources are utilised lies at the heart of any meaningful indicator of economic performance a traditional and obvious point of departure is to say that for a given state of technical knowledge and initial endowments of factor inputs resource allocation depends on the degree of ability to transform inputs into outputs and the relative returns which these resources can earn in this paper the more recent productive performance of the west german manufacturing sector is appraised from one particular viewpoint whilst remaining firmly within what might be called the conventional framework of relating outputs to the factor inputs labour and capital section ii provides an initial brief overview of the west german manufacturing sector over the period i 970 80 in which some of the more interesting trends are noted for a more detailed analysis in later sections section iii sets out the approach used again this is not very extensive given the relatively well documented nature of the methodology section iv takes the form of some notes on the data used with a more substantial section v containing the major analysis some more general observations and concluding comments are brought together in a final section vi

social security outcomes by racial and education groups this article evaluates the social security outcomes for different racial and education groups outcomes differ across groups due to the interactions between group specific mortality risks and lifetime earnings the benefit formula and the benefit package which includes life insurance spousal benefits and retirement pensions based on either the rate of return or present value individuals with less education fare better than those with higher educations this holds even before accounting for preretirement survivors benefits which when accounted for reinforce this finding single whites do considerably better than single blacks when outcomes are compared by internal rates of return accounting for survivors benefits reduces regressivity but blacks continue to fare worse than whites in contrast based on present values whites generally do worse than their respective counterparts social security is primarily an intergenerational transfer system providing payments to retired workers and their families financed by payroll taxes on current workers the old age and survivors insurance oasi program also provides life insurance through survivors benefits because longer lives are positively related to income the retirement pension favors workers with higher lifetime incomes other things equal conversely survivors insurance is more likely to be awarded within groups with higher mortality rates at younger ages which happens to be those with lower incomes further the benefit formula replaces a higher percentage of the income of workers with lower lifetime earnings while spousal retirement benefits favor couples in which only one spouse works as a result any particular group s outcome depends on their lifetime earnings their group specific longevity the tax rates they face and the social security benefit formula there have been quite a few studies devoted to calculating the internal rate of return and net present value of social security some consensus has been reached by those studies early generations do better than later generations women do better than men and married couples with a single earner do better than singles or working couples these results are not surprising given that a pay as you go system usually generates a higher return in its start up phase than in the mature phase that women live longer than men and that nonworking spouses receive benefits without making tax payments however to date a consensus has not been reached on some of the more interesting but less obvious issues such as how different income classes or different races fare in the system this article

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

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

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

the measurement of productive efficiency a reconsideration the purpose of this paper is to generalize the farrell indexes of productive efficiency to nonhomothetic production technologies and at the same time maintain the cost interpretation of the farrell measures since the generalized indexes rely heavily on recent developments in the estimation of frontier cost and production functions several frontier models are reviewed in addition to generalized indexes of technical allocative and overall productive efficiency a variety of single factor efficiency measures are discussed the applicability of the proposed efficiency measures is illustrated with a numerical example of electric power generation

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

does medicare benefit the poor abstract measuring the progressivity of age targeted government programs is difficult because no single data set measures income and benefit use throughout life previous research using zip code as a proxy for lifetime income has found that medicare benefits flow primarily to the most economically advantaged groups and that the financial returns to medicare are often higher for the rich than the poor however our analysis produces the starkly opposed result that medicare is an extraordinarily progressive public program in dollar terms or welfare terms these new results owe themselves to our measurement of socioeconomic status as an individual s education rather than the geographically aggregated measures of income used by previous research we argue that individual education has important practical and conceptual advantages over geographically aggregated measures of income our results suggest the crucial importance of accurate poverty measurement in evaluating the progressivity of complex government programs like medicare or social security

tropical forests tipping points and the social cost of deforestation abstract recent work has suggested that tropical forest and savanna represent alternative stable states which are subject to drastic switches at tipping points in response to changes in rainfall patterns and other drivers deforestation cost studies have ignored the likelihood and possible economic impact of a forest savanna critical transition therefore underestimating the true social cost of deforestation we explore the implications of a forest savanna critical transition and propose an alternative framework for calculating the economic value of a standing tropical forest our framework is based on an average cost method as opposed to currently used marginal cost methods for the design of optimal land use policy or payments for ecosystem services we apply this framework to the calculation of the social cost of deforestation of the amazon rainforest

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

reply to a comment on industry s response to market liberalization in china evidence from jiangsu province jiangsu has experienced impressive industrial development since 1949 often achieving higher growth rates than china s national average nonetheless rates of growth have fluctuated with distinct policy periods in industry s response to market liberalization in china evidence from jiangsu province i analyzed the structure of industrial production and productivity in jiangsu province to explore changes in specialization and efficiency this research covered the years 1952 88 and focused on comparing the period before 1978 when maoist regional self reliance was being promoted with the post 1978 reform when many of the selfreliant policies were reversed to analyze jiangsu s production structure i used location quotients for 29 products the results showed that jiangsu s production patterns became less specialized from 1957 to 1978 consistent with self reliance in fact none of the products in the sample showed an increase in specialization during this period after 1978 however 14 of the products analyzed moved toward specialization showing a clear change in the production structure to analyze productivity i applied a simple growth accounting framework using estimates of the output elasticities with respect to capital and labor based on jiangsu data with these assumptions productivity declined an average of 2 1 per year from 1953 to 1978 while it increased an average of 4 4 per year from 1978 to 1988 these results did not change substantially with alternative parameter assumptions both the specialization and productivity results suggest that reforms had a substantial positive impact on jiangsu s economy the comment by menghao zhao and paul m sommers addresses the last section of my article which compared state and collective industrial productivity in the reform period series for both gross and net out

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

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