This paper addresses the issue of measuring waste due to the imposition of a production quota. our objective is to elaborate two alternative general equilibrium concepts of the welfare loss due to the imposition of a production quota, and to illustrate their use by considering costs of the U.S....

Traditional measures of the benefits of technological change use producer prices. Consumer-oriented measures are more appropriate but they require knowledge of price impacts. They may diverge in the presence of distortions. This paper shows that in general equilibrium they are interrelated...

Traditional Total factor productivity [TFP] misrepresents the true change in agricultural productivity because environmental bads jointly produced with desirable outputs are unaccounted. Nonparametric measures incorporating environmental bads support the hypothesis that prior [after] to 1980's...

This paper considers the time path of prices for crop traits such as herbicide resistance, specifically whether they conform to Coase's conjecture that monopoly prices can't be sustained on durables. While property rights determine whether such traits are durables, prices for RR soybeans and Bt...

Agricultural production quotas are policy instruments that many countries have adopted as a means of transferring income from consumers to producers. Here the partial equilibrium approach of Allais and Diewert is adapted to measure the efficiency loss in the production sector due to quotas....

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...

This study estimates nonparametric non-stochastic Malmquist indices and a stochastic Fourier production frontier to examine agricultural productivity and its interactions with socio-political institutions in 41 sub-Saharan African countries during 1961-1999. We have learned from this study that...

This paper addresses the role of non-parametric analysis in adjusting agricultural productivity measures for environmental impacts. The modified Tornquist-Theil index computed using shadow prices derived from the programming procedures is compared and contrasted with a non-parametric hyperbolic...