To examine productivity growth in New Jersey's food-processing sector, this study conducts a joint analysis of total and partial factor productivity indexes. Results indicate growing material intensity, declining labor and capital intensities, and relatively slow material productivity growth. However, due to the high cost share of material inputs, material productivity growth contributed more to total factor productivity growth than did growth in the productivity of any other input. In fact, almost half of the growth in overall productivity is attributed to material productivity growth. Results also suggest that the 1973 decline in total factor productivity was characterized by greater decline in material productivity than in the productivities of labor and capital.

This article evaluates the performance of expected value and expected value-variance criteria in achieving risk efficiency in crop selection. Results indicate that the expected returns criterion achieves risk efficiency in many situations because of constraints. However, in the absence of many constraints the expected returns criterion performs poorly except when highly mean-dominant activities are present. The expected value-variance criterion achieves a high degree of risk efficiency for all situations examined. This result implies that criteria more complex than expected value-variance are not necessary for crop selection analysis, given empirical returns distributions.

About 15 years ago a national effort was mounted to provide equal employment opportunity to any person based on the individual's qualifications without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, age or national origin. This effort included executive orders which contained guidelines for hiring, promotions, transfers and discharges. The orders specified that additional job opportunities would be made available to persons who had not previously been given adequate opportunities.

This paper analyzes in three contexts the effects of changing economic conditions and varying economic perspectives on the way land is considered in economic doctrine. The first considers agricultural land use where agriculture is connected to the rest of the economy exclusively through input and commodity markets, and when all other parts of the economy are assumed to remain constant. The second connects agriculture to the remainder of the economy by virtue of a shared natural environment, facilitating a discussion of natural resource and environmental economics in relation to agricultural, institutional, and land economics. The third context permits economic change in the entire economy with particular attention given to population density, space, and distance. Private and public decision making are discussed with attention to federal, state, and local division of powers.

“Give the government back to the people,” a popular phrase in recent months, exemplifies the concern over the proper role of the federal, state and local units of government in providing and financing public services. Constituents are frustrated by bureaucratic programs, frequently insensitive to local needs, that are initiated at higher levels of government. They are equally frustrated by the inability of units of local government to initiate and finance programs designed to satisfy the needs of the local community.

This paper examines Chinese pesticide firms’ use and perceptions of various means of intellectual property (IP) protection in protecting their innovations, using a unique dataset from 97 pesticide firms surveyed in 2008. These firms rate Chinese patents as quite effective in protecting their IP from infringement, although 70 percent of them state that improved enforcement is needed. Those firms that have been granted patents and those that claim their patents have been infringed upon both give lower ratings to the perceived effectiveness of patents. Trademarks are rated as less effective than patents, but firms that have had experience with patenting and infringement of patents tend to rate trademarks as more effective than those firms that do not have direct experience with the patent system. General government policies to encourage increased privatization, more private R&D, and higher education are associated with more faith in IP, but policies to strengthen IP by promoting mandatory IP training and the development of specialized IP divisions in the firms do not influence perceptions of IP effectiveness. We conclude that if the Chinese government wants to encourage innovation using IP protection, it must focus on improving the enforcement of patents.

Firm-varying production technologies were estimated using random coefficients regression methods for a sample of Massachusetts dairy farms. Results were compared to OLS Cobb-Douglas production function estimates. The random coefficients regression model was found to virtually eliminate conventionally measured firm technical inefficiencies by estimating individual firm technologies and ascribing remaining inefficiencies to specific inputs. Input-specific measures of firm inefficiencies showed hired labor, land, and machinery inputs to be used in excess of efficient levels. Livestock supplies were underutilized by all farms. Efficiencies of feed, crop materials, fuels, and utilities varied, although estimated means were closer to optimal levels.

Much attention has been given in recent years to the conversion of substantial amounts of rural land to urban uses. A variety of policies designed to encourage the retention of rural open space have been either proposed or implemented by many state and local governments. Because the decision to convert land to urban uses is generally a private decision in response to market forces, an understanding of these market forces should facilitate better policy development and implementation. This paper reports on a research project designed to explore the forces affecting rural land prices in areas where the rural land market is significantly influenced by the demand for land for urban or suburban uses. Publicly available data on transfers of rural land were analyzed, using a multiple regression model, to both identify and quantify the importance of factors affecting rural land prices.

Public interest in food systems has grown dramatically, and agricultural economists have important roles to play in contributing to and leading large-scale interdisciplinary studies of the subject. Key topics include understanding food system participants' behaviors and incentives and determining what food systems can and cannot achieve. I review a global food-security project funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture that illustrates the interactions between production, distribution, and consumption of food and regional self-reliance, as well as other important areas in which agricultural and regional economists can gainfully apply their tools and methods, including studies of the impacts of local food and network analyses.

This study quantifies how spending changes induced by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) affects production and employment in rural and urban areas. A general equilibrium simulation model with an estimated demand system is first used to project how SNAP affects spending on different goods and services. These impacts are then linked to the expansion and contraction of different economic sectors that differ in importance across rural and urban Oregon. In urban areas, a number of service sectors linked to higher-income households shrink slightly in response to SNAP, while food-related sectors expand; the net effect on jobs is slightly negative. Production changes in rural areas are generally smaller, while having a slightly positive net effect on jobs. Overall, SNAP makes a positive difference for low- or no-income households without strong effects elsewhere in the economy.

Bolivia has disseminated several improved technologies in the rice sector, but the average rice productivity in the country is far below the average trend in Latin America in recent years. Although the economic literature has highlighted the role of agricultural technology adoption in increasing agricultural productivity, gaps remain in understanding how rice growers are deciding to adopt and benefit from available improved rice technologies. Most previous adoption studies have evaluated the uptake of individual technologies without paying attention to the complementarities that alternative improved rice technologies may offer to farmers who face multiple marketing and production needs. This study uses data from a nationally representative sample of Bolivian rice growers to analyze farmers' joint decisions in adopting complementary agricultural technologies controlling for potential correlations across these decisions, as well as the extent of adoption of these practices. Evidence suggests that the decisions on multiple technology adoption are closely related, with common factors affecting both adoption and the extent of adoption. Furthermore, there is a need to better target resource-poor farmers, improve information-diffusion channels on agricultural practices, and better use existing farmers' organizations to enhance rice technology adoption.

We disentangle the effects of biodiesel incentives and shale oil expansion on the long-run equilibrium price relationships among biodiesel feedstocks and crude oil in the United States (US) and European Union (EU). We find that the 2005 Energy Policy Act in the US substantially increased the responsiveness of soy oil, canola oil, and corn oil prices to crude oil price movements. However, in recent years, expansion in the global supply of crude oil from shale oil extraction has offset the effects of US biodiesel incentives and blending mandates. In the EU, the Indirect Land Use Change Directive of 2015 substantially reduced the responsiveness of biodiesel feedstock prices to crude oil price movements.

Research on ecosystem services (ES) is heavily concentrated on ecological and economic indicators and values, with a much more limited understanding of communities’ dependence on cultural ES. That body of research is also typically focused on current generations and generates limited insights into the intergenerational dynamics of ES dependence. We use a survey of six palm harvesting communities in coastal western Ecuador to assess the livelihood dependence of four generations on 17 ES provided by the ivory palm, a near-threatened keystone species in Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama. Despite the historical prominence of the use of the ivory palm’s nut, we find that dependence is highest for regulating, supporting, and cultural ES, a result that holds across generations. We find a negative association between the current generation’s dependence on the ivory palm’s provisioning ES and that of their grandparents, who experienced the historical boom of the ivory palm’s nut exports. In contrast, respondents expect the future generation’s dependence to be positively associated with that of the grandparents’ generation. We find that provisioning ES have a complementary relationship with cultural ES and a substitutive relationship with supporting ES. Relationships across ES categories can be reversed from one generation to the next.

Federal administrative data present a valuable opportunity for food and agricultural industry locational outcome research. We review issues with aggregated U.S. public data and summarize current methods. An example empirical approach combines federal administrative and secondary data. We compare results with differing levels of industrial aggregation. Results indicate locational determinants vary in magnitude, sign, and significance across industries and their sub-industries, as well as between employers and non-employers – nuances commonly missed with public data. We conclude by emphasizing that studies relying on public (more-aggregated) data may miss locational outcome relationships or inappropriately generalize to sub-industries and suggest data access changes.

USDA uses the concept of “publish-ability” rather than statistical reliability of an estimate for quality validation of USDA estimates, which is solely based on the sample size and the coefficient of variation (CV). We demonstrate conceptually how the reliability of the sample mean can be tested by estimating the upper and lower bounds of the confidence interval for an unknown population mean using the CV. However, the reliability test for the sample mean can be made only under the normality assumption. USDA multiple-way Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) estimates are used to illustrate the relative measure of precision for sample-based estimators.

More accurate prediction of future demand (or needs) for land for outdoor recreational activities would significantly improve land use planning. Unfortunately, prediction of demand (or projected use) is difficult. Most standard predicting measures have little or questionable relevance to outdoor recreation. Straightline projections of past outdoor activities are of limited use as technology, income, leisure time, mobility, and habits are changing so fast that it is doubtful if the past may be used to predict the future. In fact, all methods of predicting (or projecting) future demand (or needs) on the basis of past trends are inoperative in periods when there is rapid change in all the components influencing the trend, as well as in life styles. Surveys and questionnaires are of some use, but their value is limited by the propensity of respondents to give answers which they think are expected and the fact that they cannot appraise their future attitude towards activities with which they are now unfamiliar.

One of the factors contributing to the substantial increases in crop yields experienced during the last fifty years was the development and use of synthetic chemical pesticides. In the past decade, however, increasing evidence has shown that use of these materials poses significant negative external effects on human health, wildlife, and the environment. Hall has stated the economic trade-off problem as follows:

Already we have felt the crunch of the energy shortage in many ways. However, you and I have not felt that impact equally. Just as we can expect to feel the effects of continued shortages, so, too, can we expect the pressure of that burden to bear unequally upon different segments of our population. It is this unequal impact that is the thrust of this paper.

Competition from new store formats including supercenters, warehouse clubs, and mass merchandisers has emerged as a major threat to traditional grocery chains. A primary objective of this paper is to understand how the store-level performance is related to the workforce composition of full-time and part-time employees chosen by the food retailer along with benefits and incentives provided to employees. The elasticity of complementarity for food retailers measures how changes in store size affect use of full-time and part-time employees. Larger store size increases the marginal value of labor, and firm hiring decisions shift to expanded use of part-time employees.