In a recent article, Oehmke reported that a high internal rate of return for investment in research when the interaction between research and price policy costs was disregarded could become very low or even negative when the effects of research on the costs of price policy were considered. In...

Using the multi-product translog cost function, this paper examines the cost structure and technical change occurring within the novel Ghanaian rural banks. The results of the seemingly unrelated error components model indicate substantial unexploited economies of scale in individual products as...

In many developing countries, a high proportion of the population resides and works in rural areas. Agriculture is the dominant sector in rural areas and has the greatest concentration of poverty: landless workers, small tenant farmers, and small farm owners. Thus, any development strategy that...

The current report analyses the process of producers' expected price formation through the estimation of supply functions, using vegetables and green tea in Japan as an example. At first, theoretical analysis shows that the factors which transform the producers' expected price formation from the...

The paper considers an industry transforming primary commodities (farm products) into processed commodities (food products). It focuses on the allocation of embedded characteristics (carbohydrate, protein, etc.) both across space and among commodities. The approach generates a spatial...

Agricultural pricing policies in developing countries are often the result of complex interactions between producer, consumer and merchant groups and their relative effectiveness in influencing government decision making. Even within governments, various ministries often have opposing views. In...

Using the total number of research publications as a proxy, the output of rice research in the world is estimated to be highly responsive in the short run to price fluctuations in the international rice market. The results suggest a danger of the inducement mechanism of public investment in the...

A survey of two rural markets in southwest Nigeria over 14 months showed that supplies, sales and prices of sheep and goats varied widely during the period with a sharp peak during the Muslim festival of Eid-e1-Kabir and a smaller peak during the Christmas-New Year period. Local West African...

The World Bank's commodity price projections are widely used for various planning purposes. Two aspects of the Bank's projections of relative prices are studied in this paper. The first is whether the forecasts make efficient use of the information available at the time the forecast is made. The...

This survey reviews the literature on estimating single markets in disequilibrium in the presence of regulated price andjor quantity controls, e.g., minimum price regimes andjor marketing quotas. Most of the literature is found to describe pure econometric technique, with only a few applications...