Providing and maintaining roads are major public services. Costs of these services are influenced by many factors. This paper examines the influence of two factors, size of operation and type of administrative organization, on costs of rural roads.

An administrative unit providing roads for a small area, county, or township, with a given density of roads might experience higher costs per unit of area than an administrative unit providing road service for a larger area, all other conditions being the same. It likely would experience disadvantages in buying supplies and equipment, making full use of equipment, hiring competent help, and in other ways. However, the unit with a large area could run into diseconomies through high administrative and supervisional costs. Actually, it may not be that simple. This study tests the idea empirically.

The general economic meanings and mathematical structure of the dual of a primal mathematical programming model have been discussed for many years. However, within the mathematical programming realm, many interesting formulization variations have developed partly in response to variations in particulars of problems.

A number of authors have discussed the economic meaning and mathematical structure of the primal of a linear cost minimizing transportation model. Some authors discussed the economic meaning and mathematical structure of the dual as well as the primal of the transportation model. Several authors discussed cost minimizing transshipment models. Recently, greater interest has been shown in specific economic meanings of the dual of the cost minimizing transshipment model.

The product-product relationship has been a traditional subject of most production economics and farm management courses for the past two decades. Although the traditional examples of product-product optimization have come primarily from the agricultural production sector (e.g., legume-corn rotations and crop-livestock combinations), the concept is useful in analyzing the organization of any multi-product firm-including those firms which produce externalities in the form of environmental degradation.

Three concepts or ideas usually are offered as giving rise to a positively sloped or complementary range on the product transformation surface-(l) one production process uses as an input a by-product of another production process, (2) one process uses quantities of a factor that are “surplus” to another, or (3) technical interaction (production function shifts) occurs.

Most spatial equilibrium studies done in the past have focused on macro problems of an industry or a commodity. There are, however, important applications for spatial models in analyses of efficient resource use on the micro or firm level.

One important area of application is in analysis of the efficiency of single-firm marketing systems. Many cooperatives and other agribusiness firms have developed systems for marketing agricultural commodities or distributing farm supplies. These systems involve multiple assembly and distribution points, and often some processing function is performed between the points of origin and final destination.

The conventional cotton marketing system includes characteristics that impair its efficiency. This paper reports on a study which examined the potential operational efficiency gains in that portion of the system which involved the flow of seed cotton from the field through the ginning process. Up to 70 percent of the annual production is harvested in three to four weeks; the rest is harvested and processed during the remaining 3 1/2 to 4 months of the ginning season.

Beef production has become a series of highly specialized enterprises, consistent with technological and temporal developments throughout agriculture. Technological developments in forage and grain production, feed processing, feedlots, and transportation systems have helped physically transform the beef production industry and altered the flow patterns of beef cattle and carcass beef throughout the United States. A weanling calf produced in Virginia may be hauled to southern Georgia or Louisiana to be wintered on pasture, shipped to a Colorado feedlot for finishing, slaughtered in Colorado and the carcass shipped to Pennsylvania to a retail chain which services stores in Virginia.

Some currently popular procedures for analyzing the demand for outdoor recreation makes use of ancillary travel and on-site expenditures of recreationists as proxy prices. It can yet regrettably be asked whether the estimates produced by those methods bear any resemblance to the market-equivalent price-quantity relationships they generally purport to quantify. To some unavoidable extent this results from the necessary reliance upon proxies, or surrogates, for both quantity and price data. The ultimate value of proxy variables and of estimated relationships between them lies in the extent to which they resemble useful concepts. Past research has been based largely on assumptions of the resemblance.

The current energy crisis, water supply and distribution problems, land use conflicts, and environmental issues are bringing with them a series of federal and state policy actions (legislation, new institutions, and court decisions) in response to the complex problem of resource allocation. In their simplest form, the policy questions deal with the public sector influence on the allocation of available scarce resources among alternative uses, and the allocation of scarce public investment funds among alternative programs to augment available supplies of these resources.

Agricultural pesticide use has come under an intensive attack from an environmentally aware society. The Environmental Protection Agency has placed restrictions on use of selected pesticides, including DDT. The use of pesticide is a paradox in itself. Without feasible alternative insecticide strategies, such as biological control, restrictions on the use of pesticides will decrease agricultural output and food costs will increase. However, with pesticide use, social costs in the form of environmental damages may occur. To make an equitable decision as to the future of pesticides, researchers and policy-makers have tried to determine the optimal level of use, optimal timing of application, extent of economic benefits, extent of social costs, and the effects on the economy of pesticide restrictions.

Most studies of the economics of migration have implicitly assumed that migratory streams are homogeneous. However, migratory streams from one region to another consist of two distinct streams: a stream of first-time migrants and a stream of return migrants moving back to their area of origin. In fact, a substantial proportion of all U.S. migration is return migration, 14 percent from 1955 to 1960. Moreover, in states with histories of substantial out-migration, an even greater proportion of in-migrants are returnees, 35.4 percent between 1955 and 1960. Yet, economists have largely ignored return migration in their attempts to explain changes in the labor force.

Energy is a complex and pervasive subject, whose frontiers are still in the process of being defined. Many of the data are in dispute. Technical judgments do not agree. Conflicts of interest abound. The Nixon Administration, in its allocation plans for summer 1973 and January 1974, gave farmers top priority for fuel – ahead of hospitals, firemen, and police. Critics called this “cockeyed,” preferring to put other sectors of the economy ahead of agriculture.

Persistently high levels of unemployment among unskilled workers, as well as college graduates, have focused attention on manpower problems. High levels of unemployment may result from a deficiency of aggregate demand or from structural maladjustments in the manpower market. The latter problems generally emanate from changing technological patterns and shifts in the pattern of economic growth. While there are many socio-economic issues involved, it is generally recognized that problems of structural adjustment can be satisfactorily managed, in time, if a sufficiently high level of aggregate demand is maintained. Therefore, an initial concern in manpower planning is to accurately relate manpower requirements by occupation and level of education to anticipated levels of aggregate demand.

Efforts currently are being made to arrive at pollution abatement standards for the poultry processing industry. Once a set of effluent limits are established, individual firms have several alternatives to meet the best available control requirements by altering in-plant techniques and modifying waste water treatment systems. This study provides information on current cost and expenditure levels for waste water treatment in the poultry processing industry in Georgia. The primary objective was to provide an assessment of the probable industry cost of achieving higher levels of treatment which are required under new pollution control guidelines. Changes needed for individual plants will vary depending on the nature of the waste, the degree and kind of treatment, and the size and location of the firm.

Investments in natural resources usually are for the expressed purposes of conserving, developing, or managing the nation's supply of soil, water, timber, minerals, and marine resources. Many public investment programs in natural resources have also contained explicit development objectives. Any explanation of employment and income changes occurring within a region requires analysis of many interacting variables because the effects of natural resource investments may be masked by counteractions.

The farm price of much of the milk produced in the South has been under government regulation for a long time. Two principal economic criteria have been used as bases for setting minimum producer prices: (1) costs of production in the regulated area, and (2) the costs of obtaining milk from sources outside the area. Which of these criteria was paramount at any particular time and location was related to the effectiveness with which barriers to the inflow of milk could be maintained, and the political power of milk producer groups relative to other interests.

This study utilizes a spatial equilibrium model to examine the equilibrium farm-level prices and production levels which may be expected for the major potato-producing regions in the United States, both in the short run and the long run under competitive conditions. The model encompasses both the temporal and spatial dimensions of the United States potato industry. The reactive programming algorithm was used to determine the equilibrium prices and quantities. Input requirements for the model include supply functions, demand functions, and intermediate marketing costs.

Crossing of breeds traditionally has been viewed skeptically by cattle producers. Although there has been some crossbreeding between traditional beef breeds, little use of dairy-beef crosses in commercial beef herds has been made. Often such calves have been inferior in quality and have yielded a lower return than the standard beef breeds.

Recently, however, considerable research attention has focused on crossbreeds – crossing standard beef breeds, dairy and beef, and standard and exotic (or new) beef breeds. When all three genetic types are crossed, several positive features have been identified: (1) quality is good – few animals grade prime but most finish at satisfactory weights as high good or choice; (2) greater milking capacity of the part-dairy cow increases the potential for rapid gains, thus permitting more beef to be raised per cow, and (3) genetic growth capability of some exotic breeds is greater so such crosses can take advantage of additional milk.

The unprecedented demand for United States feed grains has boosted corn prices to record levels. If corn prices continue at these record levels, corn production practices and the demand for corn production inputs likely will be affected. One of the corn production practices that may be affected is harvesting. And because of the increased use of field shelling and artificial drying, changes in corn-harvesting practices may have an impact on the demand for propane fuel used in corn drying. Future supplies of propane, however, may be limited, or higher priced, or both. The analysis reported in this paper is an attempt to estimate the impact of higher corn and propane prices on harvesting strategies, on the quantity of propane demanded, and on other related variables. The results of the analysis suggest that, given higher corn prices, the amount of propane demanded for corn drying will increase dramatically, even with much higher propane prices.