This research carries out a technical efficiency assessment for a small-scale fishery in Mexico. Technical efficiency (TE) is measured as the deviation of the firm (i.e. fisher) production from the best practice production frontier (Kumbhakar and Lovell 2000). Under TE, fishing production is...

General circulation models predict significant and accelerating changes in local patterns of precipitation and temperature over the next century. The vulnerability of agriculture to climate change will depend on both the biophysical impacts of climate change on crop yields and on the...

Productive utilization of resources has enabled American agriculture to supply the nation with vast quantities of food at a high level of efficiency. However, the USDA shows that 2011 pesticide expenses increased by about $100 million resulting from a slight increase of planted acres and a...

This study investigates reasons for adoption of best management practices (BMP), crawfish farmers’ participation in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), and economic impacts of BMP adoption using data from a 2008 survey of crawfish producers. Most-cited reasons for BMP...

The interconnections of agriculture and energy markets have increased through the rise in the new biofuel agribusinesses and the oil–ethanol–corn linkages. The question is whether these linkages have a causal structure by which oil prices affect commodity prices and through these links,...

Production costs for fresh Atlantic groundfish and scallop processing are examined using direct observation, linear regression analysis, and cost accounting. Assuming that management chooses a production technique where marginal costs are constant over a wide range of production due to...

In a recent paper, Clark and Munro (1980)showed that monopsony processing more than offsets the effects of open-access in the harvesting sector of a commercial fishery, and leads to overconservation of the resource. We show here that this conclusion depends critically on the cost of capacity and...

Dynamic adjustment is an integral part of natural resource economics. Commonly, capital is assumed to respond instantaneously to changes in profits, while in reality adjustment may take place only with a time lag. In this paper, an empirical analysis of capital (boat) dynamics in the North Sea...

The exclusion from U.S. waters since 1981 has greatly reduced the harvest potential for Canada's Pacific halibut fleet, making it particularly important that halibut resources in the Canadian zone he exploited at optimal levels. This paper provides a bioeconomic analysis of the joint-stock...