This survey provides a structured picture of 40 years of literature which uses welfare economic tools to judge agricultural policy. Challenges and developments of normative agricultural policy analysis are discussed in an easily accessible graphical framework. It is shown how the literature has...

Rapid institutional innovation in the 1980's has led to problems that exceed the scope of research normally assumed by individual researchers. During such periods of rapid change, subject-matter research may be particularly useful. This paper reviews research on the Federal Agricultural Mortgage...

A shadow-price profit frontier model is developed to examine production efficiency of Chinese rural households in farming operations. The model incorporates price distortions resulting from imperfect market conditions and socioeconomic and institutional constraints, but retains the advantages of...

The Zambian Government encourages crop production in the Gwembe Valley without taking into consideration the risks involved. These risks mainly originate from the stochastic nature of rainfall. This paper, therefore, identifies optimal cropping patterns in the Gwembe Valley by using Target MOT...

The well-known Allais paradox is reformulated as a daily farm decision problem. Only 26% of the farmers exhibit violations of the expected utility hypothesis. Moreover, the tendency for violation decreases with the farm operator's education, experience and family size. No effects of the farm...

Previous empirical studies on the relationship between agricultural growth and farm imports in the LDCs suffer from serious methodological defects, which to some extent may invalidate their results and interpretations. This study used Sims' causality test to examine interactions between...

The study investigates the value of additional information on the response function to soil salinity of a given crop (potatoes), with regard to a stochastic long-run optimization model for utilization of saline water in a single-farm framework. The analysis provides a conceptual and...

Recent trends in the developments of the Common Agricultural Policy suggest an increasing attention towards rural development issues. On-farm processing may offer an alternative for diversification, income generation and rural development in the event of increasingly deregulated agricultural...

New technologies must be developed in sub-Saharan Africa which are sustainable and economically viable. This paper discusses a methodology for measuring the agricultural sustainability and economic viability of tropical farming systems for new technology evaluation. The approach is based on the...

This paper uses a flexible (translog) production function to estimate efficiency of 227 farms from West Bengal, India. We consider estimation of technical and allocative inefficiencies using a profit maximising framework which accommodates both endogenous and exogenous inputs. The maximum...