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NEP: New Economics Papers
Agricultural Economics
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Edited by: Angelo Zago
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pza49.html
Universita degli Studi di Verona
Date: 2005-10-22
Papers: 13
This document is in the public domain, feel free to circulate it.
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In this issue we have:
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1. The Economic Importance of Agri-food Industries in Iowa
Imerman, Mark D.; Swenson, David A.; Eathington, Liesl;
Otto, Daniel
2. Special Agricultural Safeguards: Virtual Benefits and Real
Costs-Lessons for the Doha Round
Jean-Jacques Hallaert
3. A Three Factor Agricultural Production Function: The Case of
Canada
Cristina Echevarria
4. Assessing Protectionism and Subsidies in Agriculture: A
Gravity Approach
Claudio Paiva
5. Dimensions of Land Inequality and Economic Development
Lennart Erickson; Dietrich Vollrath
6. Collective-Quality Promotion in the Agribusiness Sector: An
Overview, The
Marette, St?phan
7. Trade Liberalization in Agriculture in Developed Nations and
Incidence of Child Labour in a Developing Economy
Sarbajit Chaudhuri; Jayanta Kumar Dwibedi
8. Fertilizer Demand in Sub-Saharan Africa: Realizing the
Potential
V.A. Kelly
9. Traditional Knowledge, Biodiversity, Benefit-Sharing and the
Patent System: Romantics v. Economics?
Hanns Ullrich
10. FOREIGN CAPITAL, WELFARE AND URBAN UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE
PRESENCE OF AGRICULTURAL DUALISM
Sarbajit Chaudhuri
11. Macroeconomic Implications of Natural Disasters in the
Caribbean
Tobias N. Rasmussen
12. Forestry Taxation in Africa: The Case of Liberia
Arnim Schwidrowski; Saji Thomas
13. Distribution of Natural Resources, Entrepreneurship, and
Economic Development: Growth Dynamics with Two Elites
Josef Falkinger; Volker Grossmann
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1. The Economic Importance of Agri-food Industries in Iowa
Imerman, Mark D.
Swenson, David A.
Eathington, Liesl
Otto, Daniel
This study investigates the value of Iowa?s agri-food
industries. The investigators define the agri-food industries to
include agricultural production, primary food processing, other
agricultural commodity processing, and agricultural input
manufacturing and distribution activities. These definitions are
used to aggregate data obtained from the IMPLAN economic impact
modeling system (MIG, Inc.) to generate both industry-specific
estimates of output value and value added in production and an
export-based analysis of agri-food exports from Iowa which
include all Iowa-sourced input values. These estimates are
compared with statistics generally available from the USDA, the
Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Census of Agriculture to
provide a perspective of how and why statistics from various
sources differ and the implications of these differences. The
analysis consists of a state report for Iowa, which contains full
explanatory text, and county supplements for each Iowa County,
which provide county-specific data and references back to
explanations in the state report.
Date: 2005-10-04
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:isu:genres:12426&r=agr
2. Special Agricultural Safeguards: Virtual Benefits and Real
Costs-Lessons for the Doha Round
Jean-Jacques Hallaert
In the Doha Round, negotiators are discussing the elimination or
continuation of the special agricultural safeguards introduced by
the Uruguay Round as well as the creation of special safeguard
mechanism for use by developing countries. This paper argues that,
in violation of the spirit of the WTO Agreement in Agriculture,
the special agricultural safeguards have often been used as a
prolonged protectionist device. It then draws lessons for the
design of the special safeguard mechanism.
Keywords: Agricultural trade , Safeguards , Trade policy ,
Date: 2005-07-14
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:05/131&r=agr
3. A Three Factor Agricultural Production Function: The Case of
Canada
Cristina Echevarria (University of Saskatchewan)
This paper estimates a constant returns to scale agricultural
production function of the three basic factors of production.
Such a function is a useful tool for macroeconomic, growth, and
development studies. It uses the shares approach that Solow used
in 1957 and very disaggregated Canadian data. The main results of
this paper are that first, in Canada, agriculture is less labour
intensive than both services and industry, but capital intensity
is similar in the three sectors. Second, the share of land in
value added is estimated to be 16%. Third, total factor
productivity growth in Canada has been roughly the same--0.3%--in
agriculture and manufactures over the period 1971-91.
Keywords: agricultural economics, agriculture production
function, macroeconomics
JEL: D1 D2 D3 D4
Date: 2005-10-20
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wpa:wuwpmi:0510011&r=agr
4. Assessing Protectionism and Subsidies in Agriculture: A
Gravity Approach
Claudio Paiva
This paper provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis
of agricultural trade using a gravity model. The data set covers
bilateral trade in agricultural goods for 152 countries over the
periods 1990-93 and 1999-2002. The estimations support claims
that protectionism and distortive subsidies to agriculture remain
widespread in more developed nations, which are shown to import
less and export more agricultural products than expected given
other economic, political, and geographic determinants of trade.
However, some developing regions that are often thought to be the
main victims of industrial-country protectionism are also found
to be relatively closed to agricultural trade.
Keywords: Protectionism , Trade , Agricultural subsidies ,
Economic models ,
Date: 2005-02-08
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:05/21&r=agr
5. Dimensions of Land Inequality and Economic Development
Lennart Erickson
Dietrich Vollrath
There are several theories linking land inequality with aspects
of economic development. Empirical work on these theories has
attempted to establish a relationship between land inequality and
institutions, financial development, and education. This research,
though, has relied on measures of land inequality that capture
only inequality within the class of landholders, ignoring
completely the issue of landlessness. This omission raises
suspicion about the usefulness of those empirical results. We use
a new measure of the breadth of landholdings across the
agricultural population to address this issue. We test the
proposed relationships regarding land inequality and development
using the new measure. The regressions fail to find significant
and robust relationships between land inequality of either type
and institutions or financial development. We do find that lower
land inequality across agricultural populations, but not
inequality within the landholding class, is associated with
greater public provision of education.
Keywords: Land reform , Development , Financial sector ,
Education ,
Date: 2004-09-02
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:04/158&r=agr
6. Collective-Quality Promotion in the Agribusiness Sector: An
Overview, The
Marette, St?phan
This paper reviews the economic effects of collective-quality
promotion through a survey of the recent literature devoted to
common labeling and professional groups. Benefits and costs of
common labeling and professional groups for improving quality are
detailed. Some empirical facts are presented, mainly focusing on
some European examples, since many European countries have a long
history of producer-owned marketing programs. This paper shows
that in some cases the collective-quality promotion can be a
successful strategy for firms/farmers.
Keywords: collective-quality promotion, labeling, marketing
organization, quality signals.
Date: 2005-10-12
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:isu:genres:12431&r=agr
7. Trade Liberalization in Agriculture in Developed Nations and
Incidence of Child Labour in a Developing Economy
Sarbajit Chaudhuri (Department of Economics, Calcutta
University, India)
Jayanta Kumar Dwibedi (Dept. of Economics, Brahmananda
Keshab Chandra College, India)
This paper is an attempt to analyze the consequence of trade
liberalization in agriculture in the developed countries on the
incidence of child labour in a developing economy in terms of a
three- sector general equilibrium model with informal sectors.
Adult labour and child labour are substitutes to each other in
the two informal sectors of the economy and are used together
apart from capital in producing two exportable commodities. The
interesting result that appears from the analysis is that
agricultural trade liberalization in the developed countries may
be effective in bringing down the incidence of child labour in
the system. The paper substantiates the desirability of trade
liberalization in agriculture in the developed nations from the
perspective of the developing economies for reason other than
welfare improvement.
Keywords: Child labour, trade liberalization in agriculture,
informal sector, general equilibrium model
JEL: F10 J10 J13 I28
Date: 2005-10-20
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wpa:wuwpit:0510009&r=agr
8. Fertilizer Demand in Sub-Saharan Africa: Realizing the
Potential
V.A. Kelly (Department of Agricultural Economics, Michigan
State University)
The growing contrast between the very limited use of fertilizer
in Sub-Saharan Africa (only 9 kg of nutrients per hectare) and
the role played by fertilizer in other regions of the world (100-
135 kg/ha in Asia, where 50% of yield growth is attributed to
fertilizer) has stimulated debate about the role of fertilizer in
Africa and what types of policies and programs are needed to
realize its potential benefits. The objective of this paper is to
provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of
knowledge and the key debates concerning fertilizer demand in Sub-
Saharan Africa (SSA). Technical, economic, and policy issues are
addressed. The underlying assumption is that SSA needs to
increase fertilizer consumption to meet agricultural growth,
poverty reduction, and environmental objectives. This will
require policies and programs that encourage economically sound
and technically efficient fertilizer use, not simply increased
use.
Keywords: food security, food policy, fertilizer demand
JEL: Q18
Date: 2005
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:msu:polbrf:077&r=agr
9. Traditional Knowledge, Biodiversity, Benefit-Sharing and the
Patent System: Romantics v. Economics?
Hanns Ullrich
Since the nineties of the last century two opposite trends have
marked the development of international intellectual property
protection. On the one hand, world trade negotiations have
resulted in the establishment of a globally uniform system of
adequate protection of intellectual property by the GATT/WTO
Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights. It basically enshrines the market-oriented principles of
protection of industrially developed countries. On the other,
efforts to protect traditional and local knowledge have found
specific support in the Convention on Biological Diversity which,
in addition to providing, in the interest of environment
protection, for mechanisms for the control of access to genetic
resources, seeks to promote the condition of developing countries
by subjecting such access to principles of prior informed consent
and of participation in the benefit enterprises may obtain on the
basis of patent protected inventions and innovations embodying or
using genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge. The
paper first examines the various ways in which biodiversity-
related traditional knowledge may be passively or actively
defended or protected, but concludes that, with the exception of
a defence against misuses of the intellectual property system,
little is to be expected from either reliance on existing forms
of protecting intellectual property or from the development of
more or less analogous forms of sui generis protection, the main
reason being that intellectual property protection is a market-
oriented mechanism, not a measure of knowledge conservation. In a
second part the conflicts are analysed which arise when, as under
the Biodiversity Convention, the market-oriented system of
protection is put at the service of regulatory schemes aiming at
non-market goals, in particular when the acquisition of patents
is subject to additional and not directly related disclosure
requirements, and when the exploitation of patents is conditioned
on ?equitable benefit sharing?. The main conclusion is that
such burdening of patent protected innovation with specific
environmental and developmental charges will result in negative
synergies. These may have a counterproductive impact first, on
the attainment of the regulatory objectives of protecting
biodiversity and of promoting development and, second, on the
technological neutrality of patent protection as an incentive
mechanism for innovation in general. Additional problems of the
legitimacy of using intellectual property as a support of
objective-specific regulation suggest to implement the Convention
on Biodiversity on the basis of a clearer separation between
protection of biodiversity, promotion of development and
stimulation of innovation, since this would bring it more in
accordance with principles of proportionality regarding the
selection and the use of regulatory instruments.?
Keywords: economic law; international trade; pharmaceutical
industry; Uruguay round; environmental policy; trade
policy; international relations; WTO; knowledge
Date: 2005-05-01
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:erp:euilaw:p0023&r=agr
10. FOREIGN CAPITAL, WELFARE AND URBAN UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE
PRESENCE OF AGRICULTURAL DUALISM
Sarbajit Chaudhuri (Dept. of Economics, Calcutta University,
India)
In a two sector mobile capital Harris-Todaro model, such as
Corden and Findlay (1975), an inflow of foreign capital in the
presence of protectionist policy is welfare deteriorating as well
as unemployment accentuating. But, the developing countries have
chosen liberalized investment and trade policies as their
development strategies and have been able to attract a
considerable amount of foreign capital during the last two
decades. A relevant question is why these countries are yearning
for foreign capital given its detrimental effects as predicted by
the conventional theoretical literature on trade and development.
This paper makes an attempt to address the above issue in terms
of a three sector Harris-Todaro model with agricultural dualism
and a non- traded final commodity. In the given setup, an inflow
of foreign capital is likely to improve welfare and does not
necessarily worsen the problem of unemployment. The paper may
also be useful to explain as to why many of the developing
economies have experienced ?jobless growth? in the
liberalized regime.
Keywords: Foreign capital, rural-urban migration, welfare, urban
unemployment, general equilibrium, import tariff,
jobless growth
JEL: F2 F21 O17
Date: 2005-10-20
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wpa:wuwpit:0510010&r=agr
11. Macroeconomic Implications of Natural Disasters in the
Caribbean
Tobias N. Rasmussen
Each year natural disasters affect about 200 million people and
cause about $50 billion in damage. This paper compares the
incidence of natural disasters across countries along several
dimensions and finds that the relative costs tend to be far
higher in developing countries than in advanced economies. The
analysis shows that small island states are especially vulnerable,
with the countries of the Eastern Caribbean standing out as
among the most disaster-prone in the world. Natural disasters are
found to have had a discernible macroeconomic impact, including
large effects on fiscal and external balances, pointing to an
important role for precautionary measures.
Keywords: Emergency assistance , Developing countries ,
Date: 2004-12-10
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:04/224&r=agr
12. Forestry Taxation in Africa: The Case of Liberia
Arnim Schwidrowski
Saji Thomas
Countries generally tax the forestry sector to achieve the twin
objectives of revenue maximization and sustainability of logging
levels. In an ideal world of perfect markets and information,
auctions would be the best instrument to determine the price of
extraction rights. However, a number of factors-including a lack
of information on the forest resources under consideration,
uncertainties as to the stability of property rights over time,
and a lack of access to credit-have limited the use of auctions
so far, particularly in low-income countries. To establish
transparency of the forestry sector's financial flows, this paper
discusses a radical simplification of Liberia's current timber
tax structure, including a proposal to reduce the sector's
current tax system to two instruments, an area tax and an export
tax.
Keywords: Taxation , Liberia , Agriculture ,
Date: 2005-08-12
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:05/156&r=agr
13. Distribution of Natural Resources, Entrepreneurship, and
Economic Development: Growth Dynamics with Two Elites
Josef Falkinger (University of Zurich, CESifo and IZA Bonn)
Volker Grossmann (University of Zurich, CESifo and IZA Bonn)
This paper develops a model in which the interaction of
entrepreneurial investments and power of the owners of land or
other natural resources determines structural change and economic
development. A more equal distribution of natural resources
promotes structural change and growth through two channels: First,
by weakening oligopsony power of owners and thereby easing
entrepreneurial investments for credit-constrained individuals
whose investment possibilities depend on their income earned in
the primary goods sector. Second, by shifting the distribution of
political power from resource owners towards the entrepreneurial
elite, resulting in economic policy and institutions which are
more conducive to entrepreneurship and productivity progress. We
argue that these hypotheses are consistent with a large body of
historical evidence from the Americas and with evidence on
transition economies.
Keywords: credit constraints, distribution, economic development,
entrepreneurship, institutions, oligopsony power,
political elites
JEL: O10 H50
Date: 2005-09
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp1756&r=agr
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