This paper examines changes in agricultural productivity in 18 developing countries over the period 1961 to 1985. Because input price series are not available, we use the concept of distance function and the nonparametric, quantity-based Malmquist index approach, and contrast the results with...

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....

This report presents aggregate data on agricultural inputs and outputs for 18 developing countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Philippines, Portugal, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, and Zambia for 1961-88.

This paper addresses the issue of measuring welfare losses due to imposition of a production quota. The topic of welfare measurement is important in agriculture because production quotas are a ubiquitous component of agricultural policy. While it is probably true that in the arena of policy...

Developing countries often tax agriculture heavily, a practice that might affect the productivity as well as the quantity of resources allocated to agriculture. A variable-coefficient cross-country agricultural production function is estimated, with past price expectations among the determinants...

Recent studies have revealed that LDCs have been taxing their agricultural sectors at rates of 40 to 50 percent. While it is widely acknowledged that this taxation might have significant allocative effects, this paper examines a cross-country aggregated agricultural production function. The...

The expansion of the corn ethanol industry after 2003 increased corn prices throughout the United States, and, in some cases, prices were shown to be higher with proximity to individual ethanol plants. This leads to the hypothesis that the value of farmland in close proximity to ethanol plants...

Economic viability of the US corn ethanol industry depends on prices, technical and economic efficiency of plants and on continuation of policy support. Public policy support is tied to the environmental efficiency of plants measured as their impact on emissions of greenhouse gases. This study...

In this study we use data envelopment analysis to decompose the overall economic efficiency of a sample of ethanol plants into three subcomponents: technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and a new component we call marketing efficiency. The relative importance of these sources of efficiency...

We extend data envelopment analysis (DEA) to decompose the economic efficiency of a sample of ethanol plants into internal (technical and allocative) and boundary (marketing) sources. This decomposition allows us to evaluate the channels through which different plant characteristics affect plant...