This article tests the efficiency of the hog options market and assesses the impact of the 1996 contract redesign on efficiency. We find that the hog options market is efficient, but some options yielded excess returns during the live hogs period but not during the lean hogs period. Our findings...

Commercial rice imports have accounted for approximately 61%, food aid in rice accounted for about 2%, and domestic rice accounted for some 37% per annum of rice consumption in Ghana over the four years between 2000 and 2003. Compared to the 1990s, these figures show a gradual decline in the...

Includes cover page, journal info, contents page, and editorial information

The use of economic analysis to aid farm input investment decisions has been contentious because of observed flatness of economic response in the region of the optimum input. In this paper an application of a crop simulation model, to specify the production response, in conjunction with...

Cover page and table of contents for issue 41/2

Hungary became the member of European Union in 2004. The authors want to show that, though, many sectors of Hungarian agriculture have been operating at low level of technology and efficiency; there was a big expectation about the fast catching up with accession to European Union. This paper...

This study reports findings from a mail survey of Western Australian broadacre farmers participating in quality assurance (QA) accreditation. A 50 percent response rate generated a sample size of 78 usable replies. The average farm in the survey spent $13,470 gaining QA accreditation, upgrading...

Nitrogen is a crucial input for the efficient production of rice and is generally applied in two split treatments, before flooding the rice paddocks at sowing time and within a week after the beginning of the panicle initiation stage. There is no pre-sowing test to estimate nitrogen requirements...

Few studies of farm technical efficiency consider differences in the physical environments of the farms. This study examines rain-fed broadacre agriculture and shows how neglect of rainfall differences between farms affects measures of farm technical efficiency (TE). Applying data envelopment...