Economists investigating consumer demand have accumulated considerable evidence showing that consumers generally have subjective preferences for characteristics of products and that their demand for products is significantly affected by their perceptions of the product's attributes. However, the...

This paper presents an ex ante analysis of the private and social profitability of the introduction of Bt cotton for a major cotton producing area of northern Mozambique. Cotton is especially relevant to rural poverty reduction because smallholders often have few alternative cash earning...

Groundnut is an important component of the national food supply. It does not only have nutritional and dietary value, groundnut also provides cash to farmers; enrich the soil with nitrogen through biological nitrogen fixation; and its haulms can be used as fodder and fuel. Groundnut production...

Breeding can result in more output per unit of inputs as well as improved quality of outputs. A genetic-based technical change component is introduced into the Malmquist index, and productivity growth due to genetic and nongenetic factors is estimated for Icelandic dairy farms with quality...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

We provide a general framework for quantifying the effects of genotypic selection prediction accuracy and varying cost ratios of phenotyping to genotyping on the economic performance of genotypic selection relative to traditional phenotypic selection. Economic performance is measured using...

The total factor productivity indexes of five key Commonwealth fisheries have been developed using the Fisher index and ABARES survey data. Where fish stock biomass information is available, these indexes are also adjusted for changes in fish stocks. In trend terms, productivity increased over...

Non-price competition is increasingly important in world food markets. Recently, the expression export sophistication has been introduced in the economic literature to refer to a wide set of attributes that increase product value. An index has been proposed to measure sophistication in an...