The Northeast region with nearly 25 percent of the U.S. population and purchasing power in 1983 is a deficit region in both processing and fresh market vegetable crops. This study explores the underlying factors in the long post-World War II decline in Northeastern vegetable production. It evaluates the economic viability of small-scale, family operated vegetable farms with emphasis on Maryland and the Baltimore-Washington Wholesale Market outlet near Jessup, Maryland.

Preliminary results of our study indicate that, under certain conditions, small-scale family farms can grow and commercially market fresh-market vegetables at competitive prices, and generate healthy cash flows. The optimum mix of crops would include up to three, non-competing crop sequences, with four different vegetable crops including spinach, snap beans, tomatoes and broccoli. Family (owner-operator) labor was found to be a major resource constraint on volume of vegetables marketed, especially tomatoes. Potentials for future expansion in selected crops seem to exist with improved technology and better management.

Various methods have been used to estimate risk indices with historical data. An industry perception of increasing milk price risk over time provides a standard for evaluating several techniques used to measure historical risk. Risk measures from a regression model and an ARIMA model were consistent with the perception of increasing risk.

This study examines the causal effect of a change in administration of the New York State milk price gouging law on retail milk prices. Specifically, we focus on the November 2008 shift from a threshold pricing policy that consisted of monthly announced prices to a fixed margin policy. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we find lower prices and thus increased consumer welfare for retail milk purchasers in New York State. Furthermore, the change in application of the law may have eliminated previously hypothesized coordination in pricing by retailers through a more competitive retail milk environment.

The objective of this paper is to compare alternative ways of reducing the input of biologically available phosphorus to Cayuga Lake from the Fall Creek watershed. This watershed covers 125 square miles, contains 130 dairy farms, has a population of 12,000, and is one of the major tributaries of the lake. Comparisons are made on the basis of the cost per pound of biologically available phosphorus prevented from entering the lake. Four sources of phosphorus, three of them farm-related, are considered: (1) land runoff as related to soil erosion; (2) land runoff as related to manure applications; (3) barnyard runoff; and (4) municipal sewage.

This study shows that the price-yield correlation is a major influence in determining the skewness of revenue. Therefore, normality for revenue may not be rejected even if the price and/or yield distributions are significantly skewed. Analysis of cotton revenue for Mississippi shows that this can be the case empirically when the correlation between price and yield is moderately negative and the relative variability of yield and price is not too high. Hence, for crops produced in their major production regions where negative correlations between prices and yields are the greatest, revenue distributions may have a greater tendency toward normal.

The motivation of this study is to provide and solve a decision model for land use planning for an existing regional situation. The chosen framework views the task of floodplain management as a constrained optimization problem capable of solution by standard mathematical programming techniques. The framework is sufficiently flexible to permit incorporation of, in addition to floodplain zoning, such non-structural flood control measures as flood proofing, insurance, and flood warning systems. Further, the framework can be modeled so as to include political restraints and a broad range of socially desirable goals. In a larger regional context, the framework permits the internalization of the value of the externality commonly associated with development of floodplain lands.

Expenditure patterns for whole milk and lowfat milk in the Northeast region were examined by applying the Tobit maximum likelihood procedure to the 1977–78 USDA NFCS data.

Results suggest that differing expenditure patterns exist between whole milk and lowfat milk. Household income estimates indicate significant positive effects on expenditure for lowfat milk but negative on expenditure for whole milk. Whole milk expenditure was estimated to be strongly related to the family life cycle stages through the child-raising years.

Economists since Pigou have advocated the use of economic incentives for controlling environmental degradation. In a similar vein, environmental economists have long lamented a near unanimous reliance of environmental policy on the use of direct regulation. However, several pieces of legislation, as well as common law doctrine, provide strict liability for damages from a variety of pollution incidents. The term strict liability means that a polluter is liable for the penalty imposed for a pollution incident irrespective of intent, fault, or even knowledge of the pollution incident. Negligence need not be proved, thus strict liability allows for no defense of due care or conformance with common practice.

We estimate the ecosystem service value of water supplied by the San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California under climate change projections through the 21st century. We couple water flow projections from a dynamic vegetation model with an economic demand model for residential water originating from the San Bernardino National Forest. Application of the method demonstrates how estimates of consumer welfare changes due to variation in water supply from public lands in Southern California can inform policy and land management decisions. Results suggest variations in welfare changes over time due to alterations in the projected water supply surpluses, shifting demand limited by water supply shortages or surpluses, and price increases. Results are sensitive to future climate projections—in some cases large decreases in welfare due to supply shortages—and to assumptions about the demand model.

Consumers in the United States fall short of meeting the recommended guideline for dietary fiber intake. Using a quarterly panel of households from Nielsen for the years 2004 through 2014, we employ a Heckman two-step approach to estimate nine panel regressions concerning per person fiber intakes derived from various food categories to uncover the importance of prices as well as socioeconomic and demographic factors. Prices play a prominent role in the per person intake of dietary fiber derived from the respective food products considered. Households below poverty thresholds had lower intakes of fiber relative to households above poverty thresholds. Ethnicity, race, age of the household head, region, and the presence of children also had significant effects on dietary fiber derived from the respective food categories. A proposed 20 percent subsidy applied to fruits and vegetables would increase per person intake of fiber by 9.4 percent. Therefore, if one were to consider meeting the dietary fiber requirement only through the provision of a subsidy, a large subsidy applied to fruits and vegetables would be required. Therefore, given the complex nature of the various factors affecting the intake of dietary fiber, the feasibility of using subsidies alone to increase the intake of dietary fiber is called into question.

Agritourism and direct-to-consumer sales are increasingly used as diversification strategies to generate additional farm revenue streams. Yet despite their growing importance, the impacts, interactions, and adoption of these strategies remain poorly understood. Here we use univariate and bivariate local Moran’s I statistics to identify agritourism and direct-to-consumer sales hotspots in the United States and a Seemingly-Unrelated-Regression Spatial Durbin Model to examine the association between agritourism and direct farm sales to consumers. We find that agritourism and direct sales reinforce each other within the same county but not consistently across neighboring counties.

In this paper, I have explored the link between grazing and water resource scarcity and per capita food consumption expenditure as a proxy for welfare and food security using distance and shadow price as a resource scarcity indicator in Northern Ethiopia based on a unique data set for 518 sample farmers. To address my objectives, I employed an IV 2SLS model for estimating welfare and probit for analyzing food security, drawing on a separable farm household model. My results confirmed the theoretical prediction that grazing and water affect households’ welfare and food security adversely, as predicted by the downward spiral hypothesis.

The use of stated preference methods with monetary payments in developing countries can be problematic as barter and paying with labor are common in rural areas. In response, a growing number of stated preference studies explore using monetary and nonmonetary payment options. We contribute to this literature by exploring the impact of monetary vs. labor payment options on values elicited from choice experiment studies conducted in rural developing country settings. We also contribute to the literature by comparing data-gathering methods, specifically individual surveys vs. group information sessions. Our application is the restoration of an ancient irrigation system known as cascading tank systems in Sri Lanka. We conduct a choice experiment to understand the willingness to pay/willingness to contribute of rural households to restore these irrigation systems. We find that in the individual survey setting, there are no significant differences between monetary and labor payments. We also find that there is no difference between the group and individual survey settings for the monetary payment treatment. For the labor payment treatment, the group setting results in a positive payment coefficient for the labor payment attribute. This highlights that labor payments should be used cautiously in group evaluation settings.

There are two basic underlying premises for this paper. The first one is that economics is still a useful discipline. That is, an understanding of economic concepts can contribute to a diagnostic analysis of socio-economic change in the Northeast (among other things), identification of policy options, and even choice. Economic paradigms are versatile and mobile. They help people decide how to deal with all difficult social problems. This assertion is certainly not a foregone conclusion and has in fact been contested rather vigorously. In some circles, clearly those less informed, economics as a discipline has been labeled the villain, the cause for social ills from poor roads to dirty air and water. I would not suggest that all economic advice is good, but that is the fault of the practitioner, not the discipline. Economics, like any other social science, can generate apparent scientific objectivity to support just about any motive of the user. There are virtually no sterile concepts in the discipline. When used to guide choice, all economic principles acquire a normative flavor, inevitably benefiting some interests more than others. Scarcity, the beginning of economics, means interdependence and choice based normative judgments. The challenge for economists as social scientists and particularly as policy analysts is to employ the robustness for the discipline for useful purpose, to provide insights helpful to policy and avoid being intimidated by our own discipline. This leads me to my second premise, that judgments, prescriptions and analyses by economists are probably as good as or better than those offered by anyone else. We owe it to ourselves to be involved.

About 15 years ago a national effort was mounted to provide equal employment opportunity to any person based on the individual's qualifications without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, age or national origin. This effort included executive orders which contained guidelines for hiring, promotions, transfers and discharges. The orders specified that additional job opportunities would be made available to persons who had not previously been given adequate opportunities.

This paper examines Chinese pesticide firms’ use and perceptions of various means of intellectual property (IP) protection in protecting their innovations, using a unique dataset from 97 pesticide firms surveyed in 2008. These firms rate Chinese patents as quite effective in protecting their IP from infringement, although 70 percent of them state that improved enforcement is needed. Those firms that have been granted patents and those that claim their patents have been infringed upon both give lower ratings to the perceived effectiveness of patents. Trademarks are rated as less effective than patents, but firms that have had experience with patenting and infringement of patents tend to rate trademarks as more effective than those firms that do not have direct experience with the patent system. General government policies to encourage increased privatization, more private R&D, and higher education are associated with more faith in IP, but policies to strengthen IP by promoting mandatory IP training and the development of specialized IP divisions in the firms do not influence perceptions of IP effectiveness. We conclude that if the Chinese government wants to encourage innovation using IP protection, it must focus on improving the enforcement of patents.

Firm-varying production technologies were estimated using random coefficients regression methods for a sample of Massachusetts dairy farms. Results were compared to OLS Cobb-Douglas production function estimates. The random coefficients regression model was found to virtually eliminate conventionally measured firm technical inefficiencies by estimating individual firm technologies and ascribing remaining inefficiencies to specific inputs. Input-specific measures of firm inefficiencies showed hired labor, land, and machinery inputs to be used in excess of efficient levels. Livestock supplies were underutilized by all farms. Efficiencies of feed, crop materials, fuels, and utilities varied, although estimated means were closer to optimal levels.

“Give the government back to the people,” a popular phrase in recent months, exemplifies the concern over the proper role of the federal, state and local units of government in providing and financing public services. Constituents are frustrated by bureaucratic programs, frequently insensitive to local needs, that are initiated at higher levels of government. They are equally frustrated by the inability of units of local government to initiate and finance programs designed to satisfy the needs of the local community.

To examine productivity growth in New Jersey's food-processing sector, this study conducts a joint analysis of total and partial factor productivity indexes. Results indicate growing material intensity, declining labor and capital intensities, and relatively slow material productivity growth. However, due to the high cost share of material inputs, material productivity growth contributed more to total factor productivity growth than did growth in the productivity of any other input. In fact, almost half of the growth in overall productivity is attributed to material productivity growth. Results also suggest that the 1973 decline in total factor productivity was characterized by greater decline in material productivity than in the productivities of labor and capital.