Agricultural Economics

This paper studies the effects of trade and inequality in central Spain during the eighteenth century, taking as case study the province of Guadalajara and the surrounding regions. The first part of the paper presents a specific factors model as theoretical framework that will later be applied to the empirical data. The second part introduces an analysis of income inequality in the province during the eighteenth century and concludes that inequality decreased, especially during the last third of the century. Finally the paper addresses this unexpected result and concludes that it was consequence of the success of the land reform carried out by the central government in the late 1760s. The reform was a success in Guadalajara thanks to the characteristics of its population and the lack of bargaining power of pressure groups. Following Sen’s ideas, the reduction in inequality meant that markets could work properly and that a majority and not only a few could take full advantage of the benefits of trade.

In recreation demand models nonparticipation is usually estimated as the probability mass on zero demand given a positive level of expected demand and a discrete distribution of demand outcomes. Researchers have attempted to improve predictions of nonparticipation by modifying the parameters of the demand distribution. This study departs from previous approaches by explicitly incorporating nonparticipation into the behavioral model. The choice to participate is described by a distribution of preferences combined with a choke price on individual demands to distinguish participants from nonparticipants. The model is found to accurately predict nonparticipation and the size of the user group.

We investigate human capital accumulation in Spain using income- and education-based alternative approaches. We, then, assess human capital impact on labor productivity growth and discuss the implications of its alternative measures for TFP growth. Trends in human capital are similar with either measure but the skill-premium approach fits better Spanish historical experience. As education is a high income elastic good, human capital growth computed with the education-based approach seems upward biased for the recent past. Human capital provided a positive albeit small contribution to labor productivity growth facilitating technological innovation

Agricultural science and technology (S&T) is under great scrutiny. Reorientation towards more holistic approaches, including agroecology, has recently been backed by a global international assessment of agriculture S&T for development (IAASTD). Understanding the past and current trends of agricultural S&T is crucial if such recommendations are to be implemented. This paper shows how the concepts of
technological paradigms and trajectories can help analyse the agricultural S&T landscape and dynamics. Genetic engineering and agroecology can be usefully analysed as two different technological paradigms, even though they have not been equally successful in influencing agricultural research. We used a Systems of Innovation (SI) approach to identify the determinants of innovation (the factors that influence
research choices) within agricultural research systems. The influence of each determinant is systematically described (e.g. funding priorities, scientists’ cognitive and cultural routines etc.). As a result of their interactions, these determinants construct a technological regime and a lock-in situation that hinders the development of agroecological engineering. Issues linked to breaking out of this lock-in situation are finally discussed.

Harmful non-indigenous species (NIS) introductions lead to loss of biodiversity and serious economic impacts. Government agencies have to decide on the allocation of limited resources to manage the risk posed by multiple NIS. Bioeconomic modelling has focused on single species and little is known about the optimal management of multiple NIS using a common budget. A comprehensive bioeconomic model that considers the exclusion, detection and control of multiple NIS spreading by stratified dispersal and presenting Allee effects was developed and applied to manage the simultaneous risk posed by Colorado beetle, the bacterium causing potato ring rot and western corn rootworm in the UK. A genetic algorithm was used to study the optimal management under uncertainty. Optimal control methods were used to interpret and verify the genetic algorithm solutions. The results show that government agencies should allocate less exclusion and more control resources to NIS characterised by Allee effects, low rate of satellite colonies generation and that present low propagule pressure. The prioritization of NIS representative of potential NIS assemblages increases management efficiency. The adoption of management measures based on the risk analysis of a single NIS might not correspond to the optimal allocation of resources when other NIS share a common limited budget. Comprehensive bioeconomic modelling of multiple NIS where Allee effects and stratified dispersal is considered leads to a more cost-effective allocation of limited resources for the management of NIS invasions.

Through a study of the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura (SNA)'s role in the economic policy debate over the 1889 and 1897 tariff reforms, as well as of its participation in the agricultural equipment business until the beginning of the 1920s, this article demonstrates that fostering technological innovation, and mechanization in particular, was a key component of the strategy this entrepreneurial association adopted in the political economy of the period from José Manuel Balmaceda's government to Arturo Alessandri's first administration. The paper establishes also that the dominance large foreign importing companies gained in the capital goods market, led to a restricted supply of agricultural machinery, which was an obstacle to the further diffusion of mechanization and limited agriculturists' investments.

Keywords: SNA; agriculture; economic policy; mechanization; SFF; industry.

An extraordinary development of the central nervous system distinguishes Homo sapiens from all other biological species and has bestowed upon him the ability to grossly alter the structure and function of natural systems to such an extent that the biosphere – a sphere of all living organisms – is now virtually transformed into the ‘noosphere’ – a world controlled by the mind of man. Thus, more than the legal or technological tools, it is the human mind that ultimately holds the key to the conservation of the biosphere or its possible destruction. Hence, the ethical positions adopted by man in his dealings with nature are important determinants of the fate of the biosphere, including that of the human species itself. Such ethical positions may be ‘anthropocentric’, where conservation is human-centred and no other component is assigned any intrinsic value, or they may be ‘biocentric’/ ‘ecocentric’ to varying degrees, where intrinsic value is recognized in other organisms or in the ecosystems as well. Against the backdrop of these ethical positions, we analyze in this paper the myths and folklores, as well as cultural beliefs, customs and practices of indigenous communities of Northeastern India such as tribals, fisherfolk, hunter-trappers, plantation workers, farmers and so forth, and attempt to trace the ethical basis of various resource utilization and conservation strategies adopted by them. The present-day threats and pressures leading to an erosion of these traditional value-systems are also described and discussed.

PRESENTACIÓN

El trabajo que aquí se presenta aborda la situación del avance de la soja en Uruguay en el contexto del desarrollo mundial y regional del complejo sojero. El interés por analizar esta temática surge de la necesidad de sistematizar y organizar el estado de situación del agronegocio sojero, de forma tal de dar cuenta de los principales impactos que está generando.

Su objetivo es aportar insumos para enriquecer el debate público en torno a los principales cambios que han atravesado la agricultura extensiva y el campo uruguayo en los últimos años, focalizándose en su cultivo vedette, la soja. A riesgo de redundar con anteriores trabajos de los mismos autores , se pretende ahondar en la descripción y el análisis del fenómeno de la sojización.

Para ello, en este trabajo se presenta un abordaje general sobre el desarrollo del capital en la agricultura a nivel mundial, analizando sus principales características, el rol de las empresas transnacionales y los impactos más significativos del modelo predominante. Se describe la organización del complejo sojero, así como la predominancia de los principales actores empresariales, tanto en el mundo como en la región y en el Uruguay. Se finaliza detallando los principales impactos socioeconómicos que ha provocado la sojización en Uruguay a nivel de empleo, estructura agraria, distribución de la riqueza, aportes impositivos y costos ambientales.

El trabajo fue realizado en base a una vasta revisión bibliográfica y entrevistas a informantes calificados. Su redacción tuvo lugar entre los meses de agosto y diciembre de 2008.

Lejos de pretender presentar verdades absolutas, asumiendo lo inacabado de las principales conclusiones y convencidos de que es sólo la crítica profunda la que permite avanzar hacia interpretaciones más certeras de la realidad, es que se invita a una lectura cuestionadora de este texto.

This paper looks at the evolution of the terms of trade between commodities and manufactures in the twentieth century. A statistical analysis of the relative price series for 24 commodities and of eight indices reveals a significant deterioration in their barter terms of trade over the course of the twentieth century. This decline was neither continuous, nor was it distributed evenly among individual products, however. The data show that the far-reaching changes that the world economy underwent around 1920 and again around 1980 led to a stepwise deterioration which, over the long term, was reflected in a decline of nearly 1% per year in aggregate real prices for raw materials.

Although the empirical literature is not unanimous about the existence of a continuous long-term deterioration in the terms of trade for commodities (the original and most common formulation of the Prebisch- Singer hypothesis) and, hence, about the possibility of inferring their future behaviour on this basis, there is a consensus as to the sharp drop in the barter terms of trade, especially from the 1920s on. This paper presents a critical review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the subject and the implications for development strategies.

The paper examines the existence of the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) theory for both Bangladesh and its two important trading partners- India and China. The PPP theory is an attempt to explain and perhaps more importantly measure statistically, the equilibrium rate of exchange and its variation by means of the price levels and their variations in different countries. The main purpose of the study is to get a comparative picture of trade balance between Bangladesh (home country) and two major trade partners, i.e. India and China (foreign countries) over a given period of time by using the PPP . The empirical results of the study provides an explanation of how relative inflation rates (changes of price level) between two countries can influence an exchange rate and also critically focuses on the degree of deviation between countries which may help to draw a forecast long-run movements in exchange rates. Finally the results also specify about the trade patterns among the countries and fairly conclude the efficient and beneficial trade partner in respect of Bangladesh with India and China.

Key words: Purchasing Power Parity, Price Level, Exchange Rates, Bilateral Trade Balance

The issues of climate change, agricultural sustainability and poverty in Malaysia are found to have been connected one with other in an interesting and circular way. The quantitative determination of the linkages between these three factors is certainly a difficult task, which is beyond the scope of the present study. This study is thus primarily aimed at reviewing the linkages between climate change, agricultural sustainability and poverty in Malaysia. Some issues requiring further investigation in order to clearly understand the linkages between climate change, agricultural sustainability and poverty have been suggested. These have been developed with particular reference to appraisals concerned with the development and implementation of social policy, programmes and practices relevant to these three issues. The study closes with some concluding remarks.

Field of Research: Development Economics, Environmental Economics, Agricultural Economics

The impacts of both climate change and agricultural practice in Malaysia are generally seen to have been connected one with other in an interesting and circular way. The depth of the impacts of the both is certainly difficult to measure as it might require a comparative benefit-cost analysis, which is beyond the scope of the present study. This study is primarily aimed at reviewing the impacts of climate change on Malaysian agricultural sustainability and poverty. Analysis of the study has thus been developed with particular reference to appraisals concerned with the climate change and current agricultural practice and policy. The study reveals that climate change is a major threat for attaining agricultural sustainability in Malaysia as it continuously changes and affects the agriculture in diversified ways. Therefore, good measurement of its impacts on sustainable agriculture is needed to ensure long run agricultural sustainability in Malaysia.

Field of Research: Development Economics, Environmental Economics, Agricultural Economics

Government agencies lack robustmodelling tools to manage the spread of invasive alien species (IAS). In this paper, we combine optimal control and simulation methods with biological invasion spread theory to estimate the type of optimal policy and switching point of control efforts against a spreading IAS.We employ information-gap (info-gap) theory to assess how the optimal solutions differ from a policy that is most robustly immune to unacceptable outcomes. The model is applied to the potential invasion of the Colorado potato beetle in the UK. Under no uncertainty, we demonstrate that for many of the parameter combinations the optimal control policy corresponds to slowing down the invasion. The info-gap analysis shows that eradication policies identified as optimal under no uncertainty are robustly the best policies even under severe uncertainty, i.e. even if they are likely to turn into slowing down policies. We also show that the control of satellite colonies, if identified as optimal under no uncertainty, will also be a robust slowing down policy for IAS that can spread by long distance dispersal even
for relatively ineffective control measures. The results suggest that agencies adopt management strategies that are robustly optimal, despite the severe uncertainties they face.

Motion planning problem which considers the search of a robot path from an initial to a goal configuration has always been of keen interest. Recent advances have influenced sampling-based motion planning algorithms to be used in  disparate areas such as humanoid robotics, automotive manufacturing, architecture, computational geography, computer graphics, and computational biology. The technical approach is organized around three main areas: 1) the development of efficient nearest neighbor searching
techniques for spaces arising in motion planning; 2) the development of uniform sampling techniques on these spaces to allow resolution completeness in sampling-based planning algorithms; and 3) the development of guided sampling techniques for efficient exploration on such spaces. We discuss the dynamic adaption of RRT and have suggested theoretical results and analysis of its performance based on its tuning parameter (the radius of visibility) on the dynamically distributed domain formulated on each traversal.

The objective of this report is to re-visit the "adequacy speculation" debate in agricultural futures markets. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission makes available the positions held by index funds and other large traders in their Commitment of Traders reports. The results suggest that after an initial surge from early 2004 through mid-2005, index fund positions have stabilized as a percent of total open interest. Traditional speculative measures do not show any material changes or shifts over the sample period. In most markets, the increase in long speculative positions was equaled or surpassed by an increase in short hedging. So, even after adjusting speculative indices for index fund positions, values are within the historical ranges reported in prior research. One implication is that long-only index funds may be beneficial in markets traditionally dominated by short hedging. Attempts to curb speculation through regulatory means should be weighed carefully against the potential benefits provided by this class of speculators.

Knowledge-intensive activities are bound by imperfections that limit the provision of incentives, particularly asymmetric information about inputs and unclear definition of outputs. Thus, performance-based incentives are not possible. We then model a contract in which the firm can use the delegation of decision rights to provide incentives. The main argument is that a fine-tuned allocation of decision rights reduces the information rents of a knowledge provider by offsetting her strategic use of the information advantage. We show that when the firm owns strong complementary assets to leverage the provider's knowledge, the delegation of decision rights can fully resolve the limitations due to asymmetric information. When this condition is not met, the provider is offered full autonomy, but it is optimal for the firm to let the most knowledgeable providers go. We also discuss the generality of our approach.

In this paper, the global agricultural land use model Kleines Land Use Model is coupled to an extended version of the computable general equilibrium model (CGE) Global Trade Analysis Project in order to consistently assess the integrated impacts of climate change on global cropland allocation and its implication for economic development. The methodology is innovative as it introduces dynamic economic land-use decisions based also on the biophysical aspects of land into a state-of-the-art CGE; it further allows the projection of resulting changes in cropland patterns on a spatially more explicit level. A convergence test and illustrative future simulations underpin the robustness and potentials of the coupled system. Reference simulations with the uncoupled models emphasise the impact and relevance of the coupling; the results of coupled and uncoupled simulations can differ by several hundred percent.

La selección de indicadores de resultados y productividad es una cuestión de plena actualidad en el campo de la gestión y evaluación de los servicios públicos en general, y en el caso de la Educación Secundaria en particular. Para dar respuesta a este problema, en este trabajo se analizan dos aspectos complementarios. En primer lugar y como paradigma de análisis ex ante de la cuestión, detectar si se dan en la realidad en un número significativo de escuelas situaciones problemáticas que podrían sesgar la evaluación, como la especialización en determinados resultados o la aparición de estrategias. Posteriormente y como contraste ex post, se comprobará la adecuación de distintas alternativas de variables de output educativo a los casos polémicos detectados. Como datos del estudio se emplean los relativos a una muestra de 215 Institutos de Educación Secundaria públicos localizados en las CC. AA. de Asturias, Aragón y Extremadura. La metodología aplicada es el Análisis Envolvente de Datos o DEA, técnica no paramétrica de evaluación de la eficiencia productiva que se ha revelado en los últimos años como la más utilizada para la evaluación de la eficiencia productiva en los servicios públicos.

Palabras clave: eficiencia, outputs, servicios públicos, educación, DEA.
Clasificación JEL: C61, D61, H41, I20.

Indian agriculture today is under a large crisis. An average farmer household’s returns from cultivation would be around one thousand rupees per month. The incomes are inadequate and the farmer is not in a position to address the multitude of risks: weather, credit, market and technology among others. Social responsibility of education, healthcare and marriage instead of being normal activities add to the burden. All these would even put the semi-medium farmer under a state of transient poverty. The state of the vast majority of small and marginal farmers and agricultural labourers is worse off. An extreme form of response to this crisis is the increasing incidence of farmers’ suicides. In such situations, employment programmes can provide some succour to the agricultural labourers and also perhaps to the marginal and small farmers. The least that one can expect from such programmes is rent-seeking. Some recent evidences indicate that one can develop institutions to address this. It is this that gives a glimmer of hope in the larger story of distress, despair and death. Incidentally, this paper provides some estimates from National Sample Survey (NSS) region wise information on returns to cultivation and on some aspects of farmers’ indebtedness based on the 33rd schedule 59th round survey of 2003. It provides suicide mortality rate for farmers, non-farmers and age-adjusted population across states of India from 1995-2004. Link is provided for the IGIDR Working Paper version.

Poor returns to cultivation and absence of non-farm opportunities are indicative of the larger socio-economic malaise in rural India. This is accentuated by the multiple risks that the farmer faces – yield, price, input, technology and credit among others. The increasing incidence of farmers’ suicides is symptomatic of a larger crisis, which is much more widespread. Risk mitigation strategies should go beyond credit. Long term strategies requires more stable income from agriculture, and more importantly, from non-farm sources. Private credit and input markets need to be regulated. A challenge for the technological and financial gurus is to provide innovative products that reduce costs while increasing returns. The institutional vacuum of organising farmers needs to be addressed through a federation of self-help groups (SHGs) or alternative structures.

Water balance techniques have been extensively used to make quantitative estimates of water resources and the impact of man's activities on the hydrologic cycle. On the basis of the water balance approach, it is possible to make a quantitative evaluation of water resources and its dynamic behaviour under the influence of man's activities. In this paper, an attempt has been made to describe the methodologies to understand and evaluate the various recharge and discharge components of ground water balance equation and to establish the recharge coefficient with a view to work out the ground water potential of an area.

Η ιστορική έρευνα έχει στραφεί από καιρό στην έρευνα των αγροληπτικών συστημάτων όπως εμφανίζονται στον ελλαδικό χώρο κατά τα νεώτερα χρόνια (17ος-20ός αιώνας). Παρότι πολλά ερωτήματα μένουν ανοιχτά, διαθέτουμε ήδη μια πλούσια βιβλιογραφία. Αντίθετα, καμία προσπάθεια πλήρους ταξινόμησης και συστηματικής ανάλυσης της μορφής και ιδίως της λειτουργίας των « ζωοληπτικών » συστημάτων στο πλαίσιο του γεωργο-κτηνοτροφικού νοικοκυριού και της περιβάλλουσας τοπικής αγροτικής οικονομίας δεν έχει ακόμα επιχειρηθεί. Στην ανακοίνωση προτίθεμαι να επιχειρήσω μια πρώτη μορφολογική και λειτουργική ταξινόμησή τους και κυρίως να τα συσχετίσω με λειτουργικά ομόλογα αγροληπτικά συστήματα και την ταξική διάρθρωση των αγροτικών κοινωνιών στις οποίες αναφέρονται, με βάση τις διασωθείσες αρχειακές μαρτυρίες που προσφέρουν αφενός τα εκδομένα νοταριακά αρχεία και οι διάσπαρτες ιστορικές μαρτυρίες των ξένων περιηγητών (16ος-19ος αιώνας) και αφετέρου οι πιο συστηματικές σύγχρονες μελέτες της Ελληνικής υπαίθρου (19ος- 20ός αιώνας).

We show that the effect of eviction threats on unobservable investment effort can be positive. We demonstrate this apparently counter-intuitive result in a model of tenancy where investment by a tenant in the current period raises the chances of doing well in the next period, and therefore retaining the job in the period after next period. If the tenant earns rents, the landlord can partly substitute eviction threats for the crop share as an incentive device. This makes it more attractive for him to elicit investment effort. However, there is a direct negative effect of eviction threats on the tenant's discount factor. We find conditions under which the former effect dominates and eviction threats can increase investment incentives. D

What happened to poverty in India in the 1990s has been fiercely debated, both politically and statistically. The Indian debate has run parallel to, and is itself an important component of, the wider debate about globalization and poverty in the 1990s. The economic reforms of the early 1990s were followed by rates of economic growth that were high by Indian historical standards. The effects on poverty remain controversial, and the official numbers published by the Government of India, showing an acceleration in the rate of poverty reduction, from 36 percent of the population in 1993-94 to 26 percent of the population in 1999-00, have been challenged both for showing too little and too much poverty reduction. The various claims have often been frankly political, but there are also many important statistical issues, and the Indian debate, of which this paper is a review, provides an excellent example of how politics and statistics interact in an important, largely domestic debate. Although there is no consensus on what happened to Indian poverty in the 1990s, there is good evidence both that poverty is falling and that the official estimates of poverty reduction are too optimistic, particularly for rural India. Although this paper is concerned with the measurement of poverty in India, all of the issues-discrepancies between surveys and national accounts, the effects of questionnaire design, reporting periods, survey non-response, repairing imperfect data, the choice of poverty lines, and the interplay between statistics and politics-have wide international relevance.

The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate.

Using original survey data collected at the county (commune) level, we examine the relationship between insecurity and welfare. Correcting for unobserved heterogeneity at the commune level, we …nd that insecurity is associated with lower incomes and health status in all our analysis, and it associated with lower school enrollment and higher infant mortality in regressions. Results are robust to the inclusion of shocks potentially a¤ecting both welfare and insecurity. We further …nd a signi…cant association between insecurity and the provision of certain public services, notably schooling and health care. A similar relationship is found with the placement of development projects. Taken together, the evidence suggest that insecurity is an important determinant of welfare in the country studied.

This paper develops a theoretical model of land leasing that includes transaction costs of enforcing labor effort, risk pooling motives and non-tradable capital inputs. We test the implications of this model compared to those of the "Marshallian" (unenforceable labor effort) and "New School" (costlessly enforceable effort) perspectives using data collected from four villages in Ethiopia. We find that land lease markets operate relatively efficiently in the villages studied, supporting the New School perspective. Land contract choice is found to depend upon the social relationships between landlords and tenants, but differences in contracts are not associated with significant differences in input use or output value per hectare. We find that other household and village characteristics do affect input use and output value, suggesting imperfections in other factor markets. The efficiency of land lease markets is a critical is sue in many developing countries, where land sales markets are often thin and inhibited by problems of asymmetric information and transaction costs. The issue is particularly important in Ethiopia, where land sales are officially prohibited by the new Constitution and where land leases were prohibited by the former Marxist government until 1991. Land leases have been permitted since 1991, and are again becoming common in many parts of Ethiopia. Now is thus an opportune time to assess the efficiency of the lease markets developing in Ethiopia. There is an old and large literature on land tenure contracts and their implications for agricultural efficiency. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, and many economists since have argued that share tenancy causes inefficient resource allocation because the share tenant receives only a fraction of the value of his marginal product of labor, thus reducing the incentive to supply labor or other inputs. More recently, others have argued that if the tenant's work effort can be costlessly monitored and enforced by the landlord, then resource allocation can be as efficient under sharecropping as under owner-cultivation or fixed-rent tenancy (Johnson; Cheung). Whether costs of monitoring and enforcing tenancy contracts are sufficiently low to allow for efficient sharecropping is of course an empirical question.

Using detailed survey data from Uganda, this paper examines whether co¤ee producers sell to itinerant traders or directly to markets, where they can get a higher price but must incur a transport cost. We …nd that selling to the market is more likely when the quantity sold is large and the market close by. Wealthy farmers are less likely to sell to the market, possibly because the shadow value of their time is higher. But if they have a large quantity of co¤ee for sale, they are more likely to sell it to the market. They are also more likely to travel to a distant market. These …ndings are consistent with their better ability to pay for public transportation. We …nd no evidence that the decision to sell at the farm-gate is driven by a self-control motive.