Книги

We measure the amount of smoothing achieved through various components of the government deficit in EU and OECD countries. For EU countries, at the 1-year frequency percent of shocks to GDP are smoothed via government consumption, 18 percent via transfers percent via subsidies, while taxes provide no smoothing. The results for OECD countries are similar. Government transfers provide more smoothing of negative than of positive shocks among EU countries. There seems to be no trade-off between high government deficits in a country and the ability to smooth consumption. We find that in countries where there is delegation' of power or where fiscal targets are negotiated effectively by coalition members consumption smoothing via government consumption and government transfers is considerably higher. We interpret this finding as evidence that effective budgetary institutions can accomplish efficient consumption smoothing via government deficit spending and lower average deficits.

Most of the large scale modeling systems used in the analysis of agricultural policies produce deterministic projections. In reality, however, the agricultural sector is subject to a high degree of uncertainty as a result of fluctuations in exogenous factors such as the weather or macroeconomic variation. A stochastic approach can provide additional information to policy makers regarding the implications of this uncertainty, through the use of stochastically generated projections.

This paper also shows how deterministic analysis may result in systematic errors in the projection of some variables. As an applied example, the FAPRI model of the US agricultural sector is simulated stochastically to analyse the impact of proposals for the new US farm bill.

In the Mid-Term Review (MTR), the European Commission proposed a series of changes to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). An important part of these changes was significant decoupling of support payments from production. In this paper, a partial equilibrium model of the EU agricultural sector is used to estimate the potential impacts of the MTR proposals on EU and world agricultural markets over the period 2004-2009. Effects of the MTR proposals are evaluated by comparing estimated outcomes under the proposals to those that would result under a current-policy baseline. The changes that are made in the MTR have the effect of reducing the production of the major commodities by varying amounts based on the importance of payments in production and the degree to which these payments are currently production inducing. For example, total area harvested for nine major crops falls by about 2 percent under the MTR proposals. In the livestock sector, however, where current payments are strongly coupled and form a large part of producers’ income, the reductions in production are projected to be more significant.

Agricultural productivity in 41 Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries from 1960 to 1999 is examined by estimating a semi-nonparametric Fourier production frontier. Over the four decades the estimated rate of productivity change was 0.83% per year, although the average rate from 1985-99 was a strong 1.90% per year. Former UK colonies exhibited significantly higher productivity gains than others, while Liberia and countries that had been colonies of Portugal or Belgium exhibited net reductions in productivity. We measure a significant reduction in productivity during political conflicts and wars, and a significant increase in productivity among those countries with a measure of political rights and civil liberties.

Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text examines the ways in which culture, ethnicity, languages, traditions, governance, policies and histories interplay in the creation of the urban experiences in contemporary Southeast Asian cities. It focuses on the ways in which urban spatial forms are textual experiences, subject to interpretative strategies and the influence of other discourses. In addition it also analyzes the experiences of modernization in such cities, but also in terms of the strategies of containment, refurbishment, and loss which this has occasioned.

This paper addresses the potential for interlinked credit/input/output marketing arrangements for particular cash crops to promote food crop intensification. Using panel survey data from Kenya, we estimate a household fixed-effects model of fertilizer use per hectare of food crops, using an instrumental variables approach for addressing the endogeneity of participation in interlinked credit arrangements. Results indicate that households engaging in interlinked marketing programs for selected cash crops applied considerably greater fertilizer on other crops (primarily cereals) not directly purchased by the cash crop trading firm. These findings suggest that, in addition to the direct stimulus that interlinked cash crop marketing arrangements can have on small farmer incomes, these institutional arrangements may provide spillover benefits for the productivity of the farmers. other activities such as food cropping.

This book presents a comprehensive treatment of the cost-of-capital approach for analyzing the economic impact of tax policy. This approach has provided an intellectual impetus for reforms of capital income taxation in the United States and around the world. The most dramatic example is the Tax Reform Act of 1986 in the United States. In this landmark legislation the income tax base was broadened by wholesale elimination of tax preferences for both individuals and corporations. Revenues generated by base broadening were used to finance sharp reductions in tax rates at corporate and individual levels.

The cost-of-capital approach presented in this book shows that important opportunities for tax reform still remain. This approach suggests two avenues for reform. One would retain the income tax base of the existing U.S. tax system, but would equalize tax burdens on all forms of assets as well as average and marginal rates on labor income. Elimination of differences in the tax treatment of all forms of assets would produce gains in efficiency comparable to those from the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Equalization of marginal and average tax rates on labor income would more than double these gains in efficiency. Proposals to replace income by consumption as a tax base were revived in the United States during the 1990's. The Hall-Rabushka Flat Tax proposal would produce efficiency gains comparable to those from equalizing tax burdens on all forms of assets under the income tax. However, a progressive National Retail Sales Tax, collected on personal consumption expenditures at the retail level, would generate gains in efficiency exceeding those from the Flat Tax by more than 50 percent! Equalizing marginal and average rates of taxation on consumption would double the gains from the Flat Tax.

Being Urban examines the dynamic interplay between what theoretical perceptions tell us about urban life and how ordinary people interpret and respond to the actual experience of living in cities. A major focus of inquiry is the strategies people use to create "community" in an environment where, many theorists believe, only alienation and progressive disintegration are possible. In the second edition of this important work, the authors have expanded their commitment to interdisciplinary perspectives and have also included chapters on significant topics that have been largely neglected in urban sociology. Part I provides a review of the themes of urban sociology developed by nineteenth-century classic theorists and early American social scientists. In Part II, the authors look at selected aspects of everyday city life, including the bases of community, the primacy of social interaction for an understanding of urban life, and conditions that produce the breakdown of urban tolerance for diversity of cultures and lifestyles. A new chapter in Part II studies women's experiences in cities. Part III explores institutional structures of urban life and broad patterns of cultural change. A fascinating chapter focuses on power, stratification, and class structure in cities, while a new chapter analyzes the role of sports in urban life. The final chapter discusses city life in the postindustrial era, and the demographic, cultural, and historical factors that lie behind the ongoing transformation of American cities. This new edition offers a balanced treatment that avoids the anti-urban bias characteristic of much that has been written on the subject. Being Urban is appropriate for professionals and academics concerned with urban life, as well as for courses in urban sociology.

In this paper we measure the impact of an individual’s socioeconomic conditions on the decision to consume wine in a traditionally wine-producing area. Based on the data obtained in an exhaustive survey on wine consumption and through discrete choice models, we assess the changes which come about in the decisions to consume the different types of wine under consideration, and we obtain the most relevant distinctive and differentiated characteristics for each one of them.

This study has used a corrected likelihood ratio, with AIDS and Rotterdam demand models, to test separability in three separable (A, B, C) wheat import demand structures on the French common wheat market. It appears from the study that the three separable Rotterdam structures are accepted by the test, while only two of them (B and C) are accepted in the case of AIDS at 5% level of significance. Meanwhile, model B seems to be more indicated in demand analysis with AIDS since it is the only one accepted at 15% level of significance. The results obtained demonstrate not only the necessity to test separability in demand structures, but also the necessity to know how the allocation models can be used for demand analysis purpose. The study has also shown a great difference in econometric results for AIDS and Rotterdam and pose once more the issue of the choice of a functional form in demand analysis.

Книга рассматривает практические стороны деятельности бизнесмена: внешний вид, этикет личного общения с партнерами, клиентами и сослуживцами, правила ведения телефонного разговора и переписки, манера поведения за столом, интерьер рабочего помещения, подарки сотрудникам и партнерам и т.д. Отдельная глава отведена особенностях этикета в разных странах. Книга содержит богатый фактический материал, собранный в ходе анкетных опросов в американских фирмах, написана легким, занимательным языком.

Over the past decades child stunting in Ethiopia has persisted at alarming rates. While the country experienced several droughts during this period, it also received enormous amounts of food aid, leading some to question the effectiveness of food aid in reducing child malnutrition. Using nationally representative household surveys from 1995-96 and controlling for program placement, we find that children between 6 and 24 months experienced about 0.9 cm less growth over a six-month period in communities where half the crop area was damaged compared to those without crop damage. Food aid was also found to have a substantial effect on growth of children in this age group. Moreover, on average the total amount of food aid appeared to be sufficient to protect children against plot damage, an encouraging sign that food aid can act as an effective insurance mechanism, though its cost effectiveness needs further investigation.

Using a two-year panel of 1,422 Kenyan households surveyed in 1997 and 2000, we measure how working age adult mortality affects rural households’ size and composition, crop production, asset levels, and off-farm income. First, the paper uses adult mortality rates from available data on an HIV-negative sample to predict the proportion of deaths observed between 1997 and 2000 due to AIDS. Next, using a difference-indifferences estimation, we measure changes in outcomes between households afflicted by adult mortality vs. those not afflicted over the three-year survey period. The effects of adult mortality are highly sensitive to the gender and position of the deceased family member in the household. Households suffering the death of the head-of-household or spouse incurred a greater-than-one person loss in household size. The death of a male head-of-household between 16 and 59 years is associated with a 68% reduction in the net value of the household’s crop production. Female head-of-household or spouse mortality causes a greater decline in cereal area cultivated, while cash crops such as coffee, tea, and sugar are most adversely affected in households incurring the death of a male head-of-household. Off-farm income is also significantly affected by the death of the male head-of-household, but not in the case of other adult members. The death of other working-age family members is partially offset by an inflow of other individuals into the family and has less dramatic effects on the households’ agricultural production, assets, and off-farm income. The effects of adult mortality are also sensitive to the household’s initial asset levels. Lastly, there is little indication that households are able to recover quickly from the effects of working-age head-of-household adult mortality; the effects on crop and non-farm incomes do not decay at least over the three-year survey interval.

This paper discusses the policies of agricultural finance and credit which have been implemented during the period of economic reform in Russia. An examination of various government measures reveals the pitfalls and shortcomings in their implementation. The main problem, however, lies in the fact that the government is attempting to remedy the consequences, rather than tackling the causes. The delay in introducing new methods of regulating agricultural finance and credit is aggravating the problem even more.

In order to respond to the current pressures on agriculture in the EU, the industry will have to go through fundamental structural change. Economic modelling provides the framework for understanding such changes. Mathematical programming is probably the most robust of all the modelling approaches notwithstanding several criticisms of the technique. Economists have long understood that profit maximisation is not the only objective of farmers. Although there are techniques to incorporate other objectives there does not exist a statistically rigorous method for estimating an appropriate objective functions. This problem also occurs at national and international levels of aggregation. This paper presents a new approach to modelling national and international production and trade through partial equilibrium and the use of a new development called positivistic mathematical programming. The nonlinear element of the objective function representing the partial equilibrium is estimated using past observations on supply, consumption and prices.

Further, the paper also presents an original parameterisation of the demand curve that allows perfect competition to be simulated within the framework of a single mathematical model. Such a methodology is an advancement over methods that are currently in use.