analyzing nutritional impacts of policies an empirical study for malawi summary widespread malnutrition in developing countries calls for appropriate strategies presupposing good knowledge about nutritional impacts of policies little previous work has been carried out in this direction especially with respect to micronutrients we use representative household data from malawi and develop a demand systems approach to estimate income and price elasticities of food demand and nutrient consumption these estimates are applied for policy simulations given multiple nutritional deficiencies income related policies are better suited than price policies to improve nutrition while consumer price subsidies for maize improve calorie and mineral consumption they can worsen vitamin consumption in urban areas

household demand in rural china a two stage les aids model a complete demand system of chinese rural households is estimated using a two stage les aids model and pooled provincial and time series data from 1982 to 1990 for commodity groups food clothing fuel housing and other commodities demand is price inelastic housing and other commodities are luxury goods while clothing and food are necessities within the food group price elasticities range from 0 005 to 0 63 expenditure elasticities are lower for grains and higher for meat tobacco and alcohol the results imply a gap between food demand and supply growth therefore china will face pressure to import food

implications of the minimum access rice import on supply and demand balance of rice in japan abstract the recent development of rice policies in japan are summarized the impact of the minimum access ma import on the supply and demand balance of rice and the rice diversion areas in the future is also predicted

risk taking global diversification and growth this paper develops a continuous time stochastic model in which international risk sharing can yield substantial welfare gains through its effect on expected consumption growth the mechanism linking global diversification to growth is an attendant world portfolio shift from safe low yield capital to riskier high yield capital the presence of these two types of capital captures the idea that growth depends on the availability of an ever increasing array of specialized hence inherently risky production inputs calibration exercises using consumption and stock market data imply that most countries reap large steady state welfare gains from global financial integration copyright 1994 by american economic association

an evolutionary approach to norms iorms provide a powerful mechanism for regulating conflict in groups even when there are more than two people and no central authority this paper investigates the emergence and stability of behavioral norms in the context of a game played by people of limited rationality the dynamics of this new norms game are analyzed with a computer simulation based upon the evolutionary principle that strategies shown to be relatively effective will be used more in the future than less effective strategies the results show the conditions under which norms can evolve and prove stable one interesting possibility is the employment of metanorms the willingness to punish someone who did not enforce a norm many historical examples of domestic and international norms are used to illustrate the wide variety of mechanisms that can support norms including metanorms dominance internalization deterrence social proof membership in groups law and reputation

prices and quality effects in cross sectional demand analysis a conceptual clarification of the sources and meaning of cross sectional price variability is used to motivate a theoretical and econometric framework for the estimation of cross sectional demand functions quality effects are distinguished from supply related price variability to identify cross sectional demand for disaggregated food commodities an empirical application using data from the 1977 78 nationwide food consumption survey indicates that parameter differences resulting from a failure to adjust cross sectional prices for quality effects are likely to be small for relatively homogenous disaggregated food commodities in demand analysis with cross sectional household budget data it is usually assumed that prices are constant allen and bowley prais and houthakker george and king given this assumption engel functions are estimated where expenditure or quantity is regressed on income or total expenditures family size and other demographic characteristics the assumption that cross sectional price effects are absent or are captured adequately by spatial and temporal dummy variables has not been evaluated empirically whether cross sectional price effects can be treated in this manner has implications for the specification of cross sectional demand functions as well as the estimation of engel functions there is a considerable literature on estimating price elasticities with cross sectional data most of the applications utilize timeseries cross sectional data annual or quarterly household consumption surveys and

institutional pressures and ethical reckoning by business corporations prior studies have provided explanations for the presence use and dissemination of codes of corporate ethics or codes of corporate conduct of business corporations most such explanations are functional in nature and are descriptive as they are derived from the codes and their associated documents we search for more underlying explanations using two complementary theories first social contract theories explaining the exogenous and endogenous reasons of organizational behavior and then institutional theory explaining why organizations take similar measures in response to institutional pressures based on our explanations we contend that the codes and their use and dissemination are arising from underlying social and institutional pressures for firms to continuously validate their existence in the face of increasing changes and recurrent uncertainties

demand systems estimation with microdata a censored regression approach demand systems estimation increasingly makes use of household level microdata mainly to measure the effects of demographic variables data based on these household expenditure surveys present a major estimation problem for any given household many of the goods have zero consumption implying a censored dependent variable techniques which do not take this censored dependent variable into account will yield biased results we utilize a censored regression approach that is computationally simple consistent and asymptotically efficient the results are then presented and compared with those obtained using an uncensored technique

permanent and transitory movements in labor income an explanation for excess smoothness in consumption many have argued that if labor income is difference stationary the permanent income hypothesis predicts that consumption should be relatively volatile in u s aggregate data labor income is well characterized as having a unit root however consumption turns out to be relatively smooth this anomaly is known as deaton s paradox i resolve deaton s paradox by providing decompositions of labor income into permanent and transitory components these preserve the univariate dynamic properties of labor income however when agents distinguish permanent and transitory movements in their labor income as the rational expectations hypothesis asserts they should the permanent income hypothesis correctly predicts the observed smoothness in consumption

international evidence on sticky consumption growth abstract this paper estimates the degree of stickiness in aggregate consumption growth sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits for thirteen advanced economies we find that after controlling for measurement error consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation with a stickiness parameter of about 0 7 on average across countries the sticky consumption growth model outperforms the random walk model of hall 1978 and typically fits the data better than the popular mankiw 1989 model though in a few countries the sticky consumption growth and campbell mankiw models work about equally well

how does the sensitivity of consumption to income vary over time international evidence this paper studies how the sensitivity of consumption to income has changed over time as the degree of financial integration has risen in standard theory greater financial integration facilitates international borrowing and lending helping to reduce the sensitivity of consumption growth to fluctuations in income the paper examines the empirical validity of this prediction using an array of indicators of financial integration for a large sample of advanced and developing countries over the period 1960 2011 two main results are reported first the sensitivity of consumption to income has declined over time as the degree of financial integration has risen the decline has been more pronounced in advanced economies than in developing ones second the regression analysis indicates that a higher degree of financial integration is associated with a lower sensitivity of consumption to income this finding is robust to the use of a wide range of empirical specifications country specific characteristics and other controls such as interest rates and outcome based measures of financial integration the paper also discusses other potential sources of the temporal changes in the sensitivity of consumption to income

food security and agricultural protection in south korea south korea has been pursuing food self sufficiency using high tariffs and high administrative prices in key agricultural and food markets using a dual approach to trade and trade restrictiveness indices we analyze the impact of these market distortions on welfare and trade volume then we compute second best distortions which minimize the welfare cost of meeting observed levels of self sufficiency and production we rationalize these second best distortions to what could be claimed as legitimate protection under a food security fs box in world trade organization wto negotiations fs box protection is sensitive to changes in the definition and the extent of the fs objectives we show that fs via production targets and reliance on imports would be more palatable to consumers and trade partners while preserving income transfer to the farm sector the republic of korea has supported its agricultural sector at a relatively high level compared to that of other member countries of the organisation for economic cooperation and development oecd public intervention mainly consists of high production prices supported by government purchases together with high tariffs that protect domestic producers from foreign competition and implicitly tax consumers trade liberalization recently took place in certain sectors and korea is now a major importer of oilseeds and coarse grains however korea only reluctantly exposed its agricultural sector to the provisions of the uruguay round agreement on agriculture uraa iatrc 1997 it has kept very high tariffs in the rice meat and dairy sectors high production subsidies in most other sectors and significant nontariff trade barriers on many commodities including administra

on the political economy of guest worker programs in agriculture guest workers have provided a source of agricultural labor supply in many countries recent legislative proposals on immigration reform in the united states have renewed discussions about the role of guest worker programs and highlighted the arguments for and against such programs even within the agricultural sector there has not been strong broad based support for an expansion in the number of guest workers a model is developed that considers competing interests between commodity groups horticulture crops and grain crops to explain this lack of support and then a series of simulations are conducted to highlight the possible economic effects of an expanded guest worker program results suggest that an increase in the labor supply would have much larger economic impacts for horticultural producers and firms in the supporting input markets furthermore under some conditions simulation outcomes show how an increase in the labor supply may lead to small revenue losses for both producers and input suppliers in grain markets

seasonality in the consumer response to milk advertising with implications for milk promotion policy permitting seasonal variation in the goodwill effect in measuring the impact of fluid milk advertising on milk sales in new york city improved the statistical significance of the estimating equation the allocation of generic advertising dollars according to optimization rules during the period 1979 81 would have resulted in a 9 percent increase in returns to dairymen supplying the new york city market harmonic variables are used to account for seasonality a pascal distribution is used to account for the decay structure and goodwill elasticities are estimated to indicate the impact of generic advertising on sales

consumption patterns in sri lanka a decomposition analysis knowing consumer reaction to changes in prices and income is important in formulating microeconomic policies such as public utility prices and commodity taxation this paper analyses the consumpti

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

the impact of the canada united states free trade agreement on u s wine exports on 1 january 1989 the canada united states free trade agreement went into effect the agreement reduced the restrictions on the importation and marketing of wine produced in the united states this article analyzes the impact of this lessening on united states wine exports to canada a demand relation for united states exports to canada is estimated and then used to decompose the effects into their proximate causes these causes are a own price and exchange rate effects b substitute price and exchange rate effects c changes in real income in canada d tariff removal effects and e removal of nontariff trade barriers by canada

financial integration and international business cycle co movement international business cycle transmission through integrated financial markets occurs through wealth and balance sheet effects balance sheet effects lead to business cycle convergence but wealth effects lead to divergence this paper shows empirically that debt market integration has a positive effect on co movement implying that balance sheet effects are the main conduit for international transmission through integrated debt markets equity market integration has a negative effect implying that wealth effects are the main channel for international transmission through integrated equity markets distinguishing between wealth and balance sheet effects resolves some key discrepancies between empirical and theoretical findings in international macroeconomics

demand for food commodities by income groups in indonesia an analysis of the structure of demand was performed on household data classified into income groups for urban indonesia a demographically augmented linearized almost ideal demand system was used to estimate the structural parameters of the demand equations endogenous switching regression techniques yielded unbiased and consistent demand parameter estimates for the low income group which had a large number of zeros for some food groups standard seemingly unrelated equation techniques were used to estimate the demand parameters for the other income groups the results showed demands for the medium to high and high income households to be responsive to prices income and demographic variables demands for the medium to low income households were responsive to income and prices only demands for low income households were responsive to income and prices of rice and fish only

limited participation in international business cycle models a formal evaluation in this paper we study the role of limited asset market participation lamp for international business cycles we show that when limited participation is introduced into an otherwise standard model of international business cycles the performance of the model improves signi cantly especially in matching cross country correlations to perform formal evaluation of the models we develop a novel statistical procedure that adapts the test of vuong 1989 to dsge models and accounts for the possibility that models are misspeci ed based on this test we show that the improvements brought out by lamp are statistically signi cant leading a model with lamp to outperform a representative agent model furthermore when lamp is introduced a model with complete markets is found to do better than a model with no trade in nancial assets a well known favorite in the literature our results remain robust to the inclusion of investment speci c technical change

rice in asia is it becoming an inferior good empirical results using time series and cross sectional data indicate that rice in asia is becoming an inferior good income elasticities declined and in some cases became negative between 1961 and 1985 in most of the fourteen asian countries studied accordingly domestic demand for rice in these countries is not likely to grow as rapidly as it has in the past as a consequence there is a potential for excess supplies of rice to develop in asia putting downward pressure on rice prices while governments in asian countries may need to adjust their rice policies in the future world rice suppliers may need to develop new markets for rice

implications of trade reform for agricultural markets in northeast asia a korean example trade policy reform in the 1990s increased import access for agricultural products into japan south korea and other countries of asia one of the most significant developments concerns rice markets in this region because of political sensitivity japan and south korea were allowed to postpone tariffication on rice under the uruguay round ur gatt agreement 4 in return south korea provided more than the expected tariff reductions for some other commodities while japan agreed to accelerate quantitative access for rice in recent decades northeast asian markets have been comparatively open to wheat feed grains and cotton imports but mostly closed for rice with no

incomplete intertemporal consumption smoothing and incomplete risk sharing this paper develops a method to estimate jointly the degree of intertemporal consumption smoothing and the degree of inter regional risk sharing the empirical results for the u s states and oecd and eu countries suggest that i regardless of the assumption on the degree of intertemporal consumption smoothing the degree of risk sharing within a country is larger than across countries ii the degree of intertemporal consumption smoothing within a country is also larger than across countries and iii the difference between the degree of intertemporal consumption smoothing within u s states and across oecd and eu countries is as large as the difference between the degree of risk sharing contrary to the findings of some past studies

demand for cereal grains in asia the effect of urbanization abstract this paper analyzes the effects of urbanization on demand for cereal grains rice wheat and coarse grains in nine asian countries a complete demand system almost ideal demand system in linear form is estimated in two stages based on aggregate time series data from 1960 to 1988 in the high income countries i e japan and south korea urbanization was observed to significantly reduce demand for cereal grains in the lower income countries demand for cereal grains either increased or remained the same with urbanization among cereal grains urbanization has had negative effects on demand for rice and coarse grains but consistently positive effects on demand for wheat only japan and thailand among the countries studied have negative income elasticities of demand for total cereal grains and for rice in particular hence rice remains a necessity and a normal good in most asian countries previous estimates of income elasticities of rice based on time series aggregate data tend to be lower than those based on cross section household level data when urbanization is explicitly specified in the demand model the estimates of income elasticities from time series data turn out to be consistent with those from cross section data

the impact of technical change scale effects and forward ordering on u s fiber demands this paper estimates a complete system of input cost shares in u s textile production using time series data and a linear logit specification incorporating the impact of technical change and scale effects on derived demands for natural and manmade fibers the specification accounts for forward ordering dynamics in the textile industry technical change has decreased natural fiber use in u s textile mills in favor of manmade fibers decomposition analysis of economic factors affecting long run use of natural versus manmade fiber indicates that nonprice factors account for 70 of the decline in long run natural fiber use

what can explain the apparent lack of international consumption risk sharing recent research in international business cycles finds that international consumption comovements do not match the risk sharing predictions of standard complete markets models in this paper i ask whether two different types of explanations can help explain this result 1 nonseparabilities between tradables and nontradable leisure or goods and 2 the effects of capital market restrictions on consumption risk sharing i find that risk sharing cannot be resolved by either explanation alone however when i allow for both nonseparabilities and certain market restrictions risk sharing among unrestricted countries cannot be rejected this evidence suggests that a combination of these two effects may be necessary to explain consumption risk sharing across countries

the demand for dairy products structure prediction and decomposition this article presents an analysis of the demand for dairy products first the structure of dairy product demand is estimated using the household food consumption survey data under the assumption of a two stage budgeting procedure a complete demand system for food incorporating demographic effects is estimated next using the demand relations estimated from cross section data prediction interval tests utilizing time series data are performed for milk and butter last factors affecting consumption are classified into economic and demographic effects and a decomposition of the causes of changes in demand over time is performed

dealing with uncertainties when governing csr policies as corporate social responsibility involves a voluntary business endeavour to address social and environmental issues beyond legal compliance governments cannot fall back on hierarchical command and control policies to support it as such it is complementary with the increasing popularity of public policies known as new governance policies where the government is engaged in a horizontal inter organizational network of societal actors and where public policy is both formed and executed by the interacting and voluntary efforts from a multitude of stakeholders however such policies are known to generate substantive uncertainty about the content of csr and its related issues strategic uncertainty regarding the behavior of the actors involved and institutional uncertainty related to the interaction process involved in the institutional change we explore new governance policy instruments to address these uncertainties in the context csr and discuss the experiences with these methods in the european union

limited asset market participation and the consumption real exchange rate anomaly under efficient consumption risk sharing as assumed in standard international business cycle models a country s aggregate consumption rises relative to foreign consumption when the country s real exchange rate depreciates yet empirically relative consumption and the real exchange rate are essentially uncorrelated i show that this consumption real exchange rate anomaly can be explained by a simple model in which a subset of households trade in complete financial markets while the remaining households lead hand to mouth htm lives htm behavior also generates greater volatility of the real exchange rate and of net exports which likewise brings the model closer to the data

measuring the effects of generic dairy advertising in a multi market equilibrium we develop a multi market equilibrium displacement model that allows demand linkages across downstream product markets and supply linkages through the common use of a raw commodity as the key input applying the model to the dairy sector we find that the effectiveness of producer funded advertising depends on the demand relationships across dairy product markets cross price and cross advertising elasticities as well as the reallocation of milk toward the advertised market we show that the previous literature which ignores the horizontal linkages highlighted here tends to overstate the effectiveness of generic commodity promotion for dairy and thus results in too much advertising

are countries with official international restrictions liquidity constrained abstract in this paper i empirically examine consumption smoothing behavior across a broad group of countries using a unique data set that indicates whether residents in a country face an official government restriction i then ask whether the ex ante consumption movements among restricted countries differ from those of unrestricted countries to gauge the departure from standard consumption smoothing i use the campbell and mankiw consumption income and interest rates reinterpreting the time series evidence in o j blanchard and s fischer eds nber macroeconomics annual 1989 mit press cambridge ma 1989 and the response of consumption to income a cross country investigation european economic review 35 723 756 1991 approach of regressing consumption growth on income growth and instrumenting with lagged variables interestingly i find that consumption growth for residents in countries that impose international restrictions have a significantly higher coefficient on income growth than do residents in countries without those restrictions thus a greater proportion of consumers facing international restrictions appear to act as though they are liquidity constrained according to the campbell and mankiw approach i also discuss alternative interpretations that do not depend upon liquidity constraints

the savers spenders theory of fiscal policy the macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy is usually based on one of two canonical models the barro ramsey model of infinitely lived families or the diamond samuelson model of overlapping generations this paper argues that neither model is satisfactory and suggests an alternative in the proposed model some consumers plan ahead for themselves and their descendants while others live paycheck to paycheck this model is easier to reconcile with the essential facts about consumer behavior and wealth accumulation and it yields some new and surprising conclusions about fiscal policy

full insurance in the presence of aggregate uncertainty this paper tests implications of full consumption insurance the object is to determine how much mileage can be obtained from a model with complete markets with such features as private information or liquidity constraints omitted the implication exploited is that individual consumption responds to aggregate risk but not to idiosyncratic risk the test involves regressing the change in household consumption onto the change in aggregate consumption and other right hand side variables such as the change in household income and change in employment status all variables other than the change in aggregate consumption are predicted to be insignificant in explaining the change in household consumption with observations on consumption and income for 10 695 households from the consumer expenditure survey the results are mixed the results for one specification exponential utility are mostly consistent with full consumption insurance the results for the other specification power utility are not

limited asset markets participation monetary policy and inverted aggregate demand logic abstract this paper incorporates limited asset markets participation in dynamic general equilibrium and develops a simple analytical framework for monetary policy analysis aggregate dynamics and stability properties of an otherwise standard business cycle model depend nonlinearly on the degree of asset market participation while moderate participation rates strengthen the role of monetary policy low enough participation causes an inversion of results dictated by conventional wisdom the slope of the is curve changes sign the taylor principle is inverted optimal welfare maximizing discretionary monetary policy requires a passive policy rule and the effects and propagation of shocks are changed however a targeting rule implementing optimal policy under commitment delivers equilibrium determinacy regardless of the degree of asset market participation our results may justify fed s behavior during the great inflation period

the outlook for asian dairy markets the role of demographics income and prices abstract the paper first presents a 10 year outlook for major asian dairy markets china india indonesia japan south korea malaysia the philippines thailand and vietnam based on a world dairy model then using heien and wessells s 1988 heien d m wessells c 1988 the demand for dairy products structure prediction and decomposition american journal of agricultural economics 70 219 28 technique dairy product consumption growth is decomposed into contributions generated by income growth population growth price change and urbanization and these contributions are quantified using the world dairy model the paper also analyzes the impacts of alternative assumptions of higher income levels and technology development in asia on asian dairy consumptions and world dairy prices the outlook projects that asian dairy consumption will continue to grow strongly in the next decade the consumption decomposition suggests that the growth would be mostly driven by income and population growth and as a result would raise world dairy prices the simulation results show that technology improvement in asian countries would dampen world dairy prices and meanwhile boost domestic dairy consumption

a simple test of consumption insurance are consumers effectively insured against idiosyncratic shocks to income or wealth either by formal institutions such as charities private insurance and government programs or by informal mechanisms such as gifts and loans from relatives friends and neighbors under full insurance consumption growth should be cross sectionally independent of idiosyncratic variables that are exogenous to consumers this proposition is tested by cross sectional regressions of consumption growth on a variety of exogenous variables full insurance is rejected for long illness and involuntary job loss but not for spells of unemployment loss of work due to strike and an involuntary move

fluid milk purchases a multivariate tobit analysis we formulate an econometric model of fluid milk expenditures taking into account two important characteristics expenditures may be censored at zero and may be interdependent across milk type censoring of fluid milk expenditures is addressed with a generalized tobit system estimator interdependence of milk expenditures is examined through a likelihood function with no restrictions on elements of the engel curve error covariance matrix expenditure function parameters are estimated using a march 1991 to march 1992 u s consumer panel

recent evolutionary theorizing about economic change this famous passage from marshall s principles of economics it first appeared in the fifth edition which came out in 1907 nicely brings out two issues which are as germane to economics today as they were when marshall wrote the first is the heavy reliance by economists in their formal theorizing on the notion of equilibrium the other is the appeal that biological conceptions3x201d have for many economists particularly when their focus is on economic change

consequences of further opening of the korean dairy market abstract this paper develops a simulation of korean dairy policy that is tailored to the data institutions and policies in south korea it compares potential effects of changes in trade and domestic policy to baseline projections to 2015 beverage milk continues to be supplied from domestic sources implying imports compete in the manufacture of tradable products we model manufactured dairy product supply demand and trade on a milk fat and non fat solid component basis reflecting product fungibility over the 10 year horizon used for our trade policy analysis we find that if the domestic price support is removed with no change in trade policy the market price of raw milk falls by about 2 and raw milk production declines by 4 5 under substantial tariff cuts of 30 40 with no effective change in domestic dairy policy korean fat and non fat solid prices fall by 7 and 11 fat and non fat solid imports rise by 9 and 7 and korea raw milk production falls by about 2 relative to the baseline prices of korean farmer owned dairy inputs labor and capital fall by about 1

the demand for meat and fish in spain urban and rural areas abstract the aim of the paper is to explain to what extent meat consumption patterns in spain are different in rural and urban areas and which are the factors explaining differences and similarities a demand system using cross section data from the latest spanish national survey has been estimated unit values have been used instead of market prices and price and quality effects have been obtained the main conclusion is that meat consumption patterns in urban and rural areas are not really different as regards economic factors some small income and price effect differences have been found specially for fresh pork and fish responses to changes in income and price are higher for fresh pork consumption in rural areas and for fish in urban areas

consumption and aggregate constraints evidence from u s states and canadian provinces state level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged income to the same extent as u s aggregate data but state specific idiosyncratic consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged state specific income a result that also holds for canadian provinces we propose the following interpretation borrowing and lending in response to changes in consumer demand are easier for individual u s states than for the united states as a whole and therefore the measured deviation from the benchmark permanent income hypothesis model is smaller however lagged state specific variables help predict state specific consumption suggesting that the pih model still requires qualification

international evidence on the persistence of economic fluctuations abstract this paper presents new evidence on the persistence of fluctuations in real gnp we estimate two measures of persistence nonparametrically using post war quarterly data from canada france germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states we compare these estimates with monte carlo results from various ar 2 processes for six out of seven countries the point estimates indicate that a 1 shock to output should change the long run unvariate forecast of output by well over 1 low order arma models yield similar conclusions finally we examine the persistence in relative outputs of different countries

home bias and international risk sharing twin puzzles separated at birth abstract we document that international home bias in debt and equity holdings declined during the period 1993 2003 at the same time as international risk sharing increased using panel data regressions for oecd countries we demonstrate that less home bias is associated with more international risk sharing more generally we show that more financial integration is associated with more risk sharing when we measure financial integration as the ratio of foreign assets to gross domestic product our results indicate that risk sharing and international financial integration are closely related empirical phenomena

do voluntary biotechnology labels matter to the consumer evidence from the fluid milk market this article examines the effects on the demand of voluntary labeling for the use of genetically modified growth hormone for retail fluid milk using supermarket scanner data retail fluid milk tracks one of the first biotechnology products approved is fairly standardized and ubiquitous and allows for cross sectional differentiation between labeled and unlabeled products and between conventional and organic brands the results indicate that voluntary labeling increases the demand for recombinant bovine growth hormone free milk in addition the estimated effects of labeling appear to have increased over time innovations through biotechnology enable agricultural producers to reduce production costs and or enhance product quality for many livestock and crop commodities at the same time however these innovations may affect the demand for the products that utilize those commodities many individuals for example are concerned about potential risks to human health although by no means all consumers have such concerns burton metcalfe and smith heiman just and zilberman the use of the recombinant bovine growth hormone rbgh in milk production has been a particular concern for some consumers as approximately one third of the united states dairy herd about 3 million dairy cows currently receive rbgh supplements monsanto product labeling particularly with respect to the provision of health and environmental information is increasingly being used to provide information about product characteristics such as biotechnology content that

the trade and welfare impact of australian quarantine policies the case of pigmeat we analyze the trade and welfare impact of quarantine measures imposed by australia on imports of pigmeat in particular we account for changes to australia s pigmeat quarantine policy over time including those changes related to the recent resolution of a wto dispute between australia and the european union using a random utility model and applying it to corner solutions in import decisions tariff equivalents by major trading partner are estimated for the different pigmeat quarantine regimes implemented by australia during the period 1988 2009 the welfare impact on consumers producers and foreign exporters is computed using a partial equilibrium model calibrated on the econometric estimates the quarantine regimes have a strong effect on trade and welfare with a tariff equivalent above 113 of average real world prices over the period analyzed

market culture and authority a comparative analysis of management and organization in the far east three frameworks purport to explain industrial arrangements and practices a market approach that emphasizes economic characteristics a cultural approach that sees organization as the expression of patterned values and an authority approach that explains organization as a historically developed structure of domination the efficacy of each approach is tested in explaining the organizational structures of three rapidly growing east asian economies japan south korea and taiwan the paper argues through comparative analysis that organizational growth is best explained by market and cultural factors but that authority patterns and legitimation strategies best explain organizational structure

economic ethics and institutional change our economic system the market economy is a part of a broader system or society we frequently study the operation of the market economy as if it were autonomous even though there are many complex and mutual relationships between society the economic system and the other systems political cultural religious legal etc that form part of society in a market economy we may identify several components a frame or background in which the economic activity takes place a set of ideas and theories the values shared by this society the set of institutions norms and rules that control the economic behavior of people and the incentives or motivations of the economic agents the play of these elements defines the operation of a market economy is ethics an institution or does it belong to the set of values and ideas in this paper i will discuss the role of institutions norms and rules in society with special reference to the economic system in order to gain insight into the relationship between institutions and ethics i study first the concept and features of social institutions and norms second institutional change and third the relationship between ethics and institutions

negotiating reductions in agricultural support implications of technology and factor mobility this paper highlights the joint significance of agricultural technology and factor mobility in determining the impact of changing support policies the impact of across the board reductions in farm support on output exports employment and land values will vary systematically across countries depending on their relative reliance on export output and input subsidies furthermore considerable maneuvering room exists even after an aggregate reduction in support is agreed upon for example the aggregate u s producer subsidy equivalent could be reduced while leaving unchanged the demand for farm labor by shifting the mix of remaining subsidies toward inputs which are complementary

does financial globalization promote risk sharing article i nfo in theory one of the main benefits of financial globalization is that it should allow for more efficient international risk sharing in this paper we provide an empirical evaluation of the patterns of risk sharing among different groups of countries and examine how international financial integration has affected the evolution of these patterns using a variety of empirical techniques we conclude that there is at best a modest degree of international risk sharing and certainly nowhere near the levels predicted by theory in addition only industrial countries have attained better risk sharing outcomes during the recent period of globalization developing countries have by and large been shut out of this benefit even emerging market economies many of which have reduced capital controls and all of which have witnessed large increases in cross border capital flows have seen little change in their ability to share risk we find that the composition of flows may help explain why emerging markets have not been able to realize this presumed benefi to f financial globalization in particular our results suggest that portfolio debt which had dominated the external liability stocks of most emerging markets until recently is not conducive to risk sharing