The nation's housing needs are a subject of major public concern – and rightfully so. The 1970 Census revealed 2.5 million substandard houses in nonmetropolitan areas inhabited by almost 13 million people. Two earlier major government reports presented a picture of unfulfilled housing needs, and the pervasive social, economic, political and institutional obstacles to meeting these needs.

Unfortunately, despite the pressing nature of substandard housing illuminated in these reports, few researchers have responded with serious analysis of the problem. Only passing attention to housing needs was given by the President's Poverty Commission, even though the quality of housing is widely recognized as a key indicator of economic development and the quality of living.

Location basis variability is a matter of potential concern to livestock producers who contemplate the use of livestock futures contracts as hedging devices and who are removed from a designated futures contract delivery point. Recent attention has been given this problem by Heifner in an analysis of minimum-risk hedging ratios for cattle and hogs, among other commodities, in which measures of risk-shifting effectiveness were generated for comparison among locations.

Public investments in natural resources have been used as a means to increase the economic base of specified areas and consequently to increase incomes and economic activity in affected areas. The proposed Principles for Planning Water and Land Resources makes explicit a national objective of natural resource development: To enhance regional development through increases in a region's income, increases in employment and improvement of the area's economic base.

Deaton and Hanrahan provided an excellent report on the situation of housing in Central Appalachia. Their arguments concerning the implications to be drawn from the situation are that Central Appalachia had a disproportionate share of substandard housing in 1960 and 1970, examination of some barriers to increase housing construction indicates that public policy has not been effective in reaching the very poor, and therefore, public housing policy should be altered.

Three questions may be raised that need to be answered before implementing new public housing policy for Central Appalachia.

Public expenditures for research and development have increased very rapidly in the last two decades. Despite the apparent high payoff from this research, there is an increasingly greater reluctance on the part of legislative groups and the general public to support such research. This problem revolves around the question of social priorities, but it also involves an assessment of the value of the research investment.

Arthur Okun recently observed that even in economics the times are changing. Whereas the focus of the profession in the early 1960's was on the aggregative issues – mainly lagging economic growth – it has now shifted to a considerable degree to the distributive issues. Particular attention is being given to the problems of the low end of the distribution – “the poverty problem.” In agricultural economics we are witnessing a somewhat similar trend with increasing interest and professional time being allocated to rural poverty and rural development.

One of the manifestations of the trend in both general and agricultural economics to examine distributional questions has been a substantial increase in studies of the distributional impact of various public programs [cf. 6, 7, 23, 24]. Both because of the magnitude of expenditure involved and its presumed role in providing equality of opportunity, education has received particular attention. Consequently substantial literature has now been accumulated on the distributive impact of public schooling.

David Holland has provided a basic contribution to the expanding literature concerned with the distributional effects of expenditures on education. He has ventured into the relatively untouched realm of measuring the distrubutional impact of tax costs and expenditure benefits of public elementary, secondary and higher education. Our fundamental ignorance of the equity issues involved in public education, coupled with the economic and social importance of its eventual product, provide ample justification for continued research in this field.

Even though a valuable literature review occupies a significant proportion of Holland's paper, I will limit my comments to that portion of the paper that is original. Reviewing briefly, Holland's goal is to determine the distribution by income class of net benefits resulting from education. To do this, he compares the average per family tax costs for the provision of education with the average per family expenditures made. The difference between the two is the net subsidy received. Holland's basic conclusion is that the net subsidies from lower (as opposed to higher) education are regressive.

In recent months, several developments have prompted increased interest in the feedlot replacement decision. Among the more important are the high prices for feeder cattle and feed grains, the narrow (and often negative) profit margins confronting the feedlot manager and the increasingly apparent need to produce lean meat with maximum efficiency.

If we could get a nickel for every time the demise of the property tax has been predicted in this century, we probably could invest the proceeds and use the interest to finance a program of property tax reform. In a sense, this subject is old.

In another sense, however, there is something very new about discussing alternative ways of raising money for local governments. In August 1971, the California Supreme Court issued its decision in the now well-known case of Serrano v. Priest; in March 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar ruling by a lower court in Texas. The Court ruled that the present system of financing local schools in California, which relies heavily on the property tax, unconstitutionally “conditions the full entitlement to such interest on wealth, classifies its recipients on the basis of their collective affluence and makes the quality of a child's education depend upon the resources of his school district and ultimately upon the pocketbook of his parents.” Since that time, more than 50 similar suits have been filed in some 31 states, and the U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing an appeal from Texas in a case similar to Serrano.

Applied economists are becoming increasingly aware of the need to document the social rates of return to investment in research and to analyze how the benefits and costs brought about by the adoption of a research product are distributed among affected groups. Relatively little empirical work has been done on these interrelated topics. Griliches made an early contribution to the subject of social rates of return in his essay dealing with the hybridization of corn.

Dr. Hady's paper begins by noting why some practical alternatives to the local property tax may soon become very urgent in all parts of the United States. The California Supreme Court decision in the case of Serrano v. Priest, which Hady cites, constituted the first ruling by a major appellate court that disparities in the property tax bases of school districts render that tax invalid as a basis for financing public schools. The applicable constitutional provision is the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, and similar provisions of State constitutions. The fact that the United States Supreme Court is reviewing a decision of a three-judge Federal court of appeals in a Texas case, Rodriquez v. San Antonio Independent School District, rather than the California case may be of considerable importance to possible future changes in educational finance.

Interregional and interseasonal competition in the U.S. beef industry have been studied extensively during the past decade. Linear programming, quadratic programming, simulation, and various other econometric models have formed the analytical frameworks in these studies.

Reactive programming was first introduced as a useful tool in analyzing interregional competition problems by Tramel and Seale in 1959. Since that time, it has been utilized on a limited basis in spatial analyses in general, and the beef sector in particular. Goodwin used reactive programming in analyzing feeder cattle distribution patterns in the Southwest. In 1972, King and Ho reported a revised reactive programming algorithm and three illustrations of its applicability.

Considerable use has been made of per capita (or per unit of income) expenditures of various community or local government services to indicate size economies and inter-community service quality and fiscal effort differentials. Indiscriminate use of these per capita measures (particularly those including only operating expenditures) may lead to very questionable policy recommendations on local government consolidation, state and federal grant-in-aid formulas, etc. Many related public and private costs are not included in most per capita expenditure data. In addition, expenditure figures are seldom adjusted for price or service “quality” differentials between governmental units.

Only recently have economists emphasized the human agent as a resource and the significance of human migration in promoting economic growth. Advances in technology, increased per capita income and population have all emphasized the necessity of labor force adjustment in our economy. Due to dynamic shifts in aggregate demand and supply functions, labor must be mobile to receive the maximum return possible for its contribution to gross national product. All comparable resources would receive the same returns when factor markets are in equilibrium, regardless of their use. While a textbook equilibrium is not likely to be observed in the U.S. labor market, it can be presumed that human migration is an equilibrating phenomenon.

“Rural Development” is a phrase much in the news and literature. Both the terms rural and development are used somewhat ambiguously, though the niceties of having quantitative measures for each term are readily recognized by researchers. Although what constitutes development and how it should be measured is a very important question, the focus of this paper is on the term rural.

Two events are occurring which could have a profound effect on the Florida tomato industry. One is the development of a technology for harvesting fresh-market tomatoes mechanically. The second is the development of wage legislation affecting farm workers. This paper is an attempt to evaluate the effect of different minimum wage levels on the rate of adoption of mechanical harvesting, and the subsequent effect on employment and earnings in the tomato industry.

Nationally, expenditures for solid waste collection and disposal are exceeded only by spending on schools and roads [3, p. 1]. In Texas, recent legislation which establishes minimum acceptable standards for disposal of municipal solid wastes materially affects the future costs of operating solid Waste management systems for smaller rural communities.

The 1969 amendment to the Texas Solid Waste Disposal Act establishes the minimum legal standards for disposal operations in rural communities. The State Department of Health was given the responsibility for enforcement of regulations involving the collection, handling, storage and disposal of municipal solid wastes. After January 1, 1973, data presented in support of the disposal operations in Texas communities larger than fifteen hundred people must be prepared by a registered professional engineer and submitted to the State Department of Health for approval. Under the auspices of this act all towns with a population of between three thousand and five thousand are required to operate a sanitary landfill with compaction and cover at least twice per week.

Dairy farmers, as profit maximizers, are constantly striving to expand the income producing ability of their dairy herds. As managers of their business, their direct concern is to attain high production per cow and enhance the average quality of their herd by removal of the unprofitable producers. They are also striving to earn a large income above feed costs, since feed costs comprise 50 percent or more of the costs of production. This value must be high enough to pay for the other costs of production, including a return to capital and operators labor, to return a profit. Proper culling or the identification and subsequent removal of the lower producing cows from a herd is important because of the increased average milk production and the resulting increased income above feed costs.

Administrators of the public junior colleges in Missouri are faced with two major problems. First, there is an increasing number of students demanding post-secondary education. Second, apathy of voters and legislators toward financial support of our educational institutions is increasing. A study entitled Missouri Public Junior Colleges: A Report to the People revealed that in 1960 there were approximately 600,000 students enrolled in two-year institutions of higher education in the United States. The report further stated that in 1971 the enrollments would climb to 2,000,000 and that by 1980 the projected enrollments would approximate 4.4 million. This predicted growth pattern has been observed in Missouri with the enrollments increasing by approximately 20 percent per year.

The report cited above also confirms the second major problem as state aid for Missouri junior colleges has been decreasing over the past few years. Voter apathy, although more evident in secondary schools, is a force that can affect the junior college as programs are expanded to meet the increasing student demand.

The difficulties associated with improving forest management practices on land held by farmers and other small landowners have been well documented. In North Carolina roughly four-fifths of all forest area is to be found in such holdings. To evaluate alternative strategies for improving land management, it is important to have information concerning the rates of change in land use on existing units. Aerial photographs provide a valuable source of this information, especially when flights have been made over an area at regular intervals extending back over several decades. In general, such regularity of aerial photo flights does exist for the continental United States. This article describes the use of such photographic data to construct land-use transition matrices.