1,721,065 research outputs found
IMPACT OF LOCALIZED CUTBACKS IN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION ON A STATE ECONOMY
Full text linkThis study examines the effects that a cutback in production by Texas agricultural producers would have on the economic well-being of all producers and consumers in the stateÂ’s economy. To do this, a quadratic input-output model incorporating econometric estimates of final demand was developed for the Texas economy. The output of the agricultural production sectors was constrained to reflect the cutback in production. The results show that agricultural producers would be economically worse off than before only if the producers of raw agricultural products in Texas imported their input needs from other geographical areas.Community/Rural/Urban Development, Production Economics,
Agricultural policy analysis under costly enforcement : an economic analysis of cheating
No full textAgricultural policy analysis has traditionally taken place under the implicit assumption of perfect and costless policy enforcement. The objective of this study is to introduce policy enforcement costs into the economic analysis of output quotas, deficiency payments and decoupled area payments. Policy design and implementation is modeled in this thesis as a sequential game between a regulator who designs the farm program, an enforcement agency that determines the level of policy enforcement, and the farmer who makes the production and cheating decisions. Analytical results show that cheating on output subsidies and decoupled area payments results in welfare gains for producers that constitute a direct transfer from taxpayers. When, however, an output quota scheme is in effect, above-quota production results in losses for producers and welfare gains for consumers. The penalties on detected cheating and the policy enforcement costs mean that, contrary to what is traditionally believed, taxpayers have an interest in the manner output quotas are introduced and enforced. The weight placed by program enforcers on producer welfare determines policy enforcement, cheating, and government intervention. The greater is the importance of producer welfare for policy enforcers, the lower is equilibrium enforcement, and the greater is farmer misrepresentation under an output subsidy or a decoupled area payment scheme. Reduced enforcement and increased misrepresentation result in lower government payments required for a given surplus to be transferred to producers. The reverse is true when a production quota is in effect. The introduction of enforcement costs and cheating affects the transfer efficiency and the normative ranking of the farm programs. The efficiency of output subsidies and decoupled area payments in transferring income to producers is maximized when the political preferences of policy enforcers and the regulator coincide. The transfer efficiency of output quotas under alternative political preferences of policy enforcers is determined by a trade-off between the resource costs of intervention and the monitoring costs. Ultimately, the ranking of the policy instruments in terms of transfer efficiency depends on market conditions, the deadweight losses from taxation, the extent of intervention, the political preferences of policy enforcers, and the size of enforcement costs
Agroecosystem sustainability : an integrated modeling approach
No full textThe purpose of this study was to evaluate the sustainability of agroecosystems. The framework developed within this study is systems-based with the dynamic linkages between the system components explicit. The primary objective of the study was to develop a computer model, the Sustainable Agroecosystem Model (SAM), that dynamically integrates the economic and ecological components of an agroecosystem. The model was used to assess the sustainability of agroecosystems, defined by ecodistrict boundaries, in the Brown soil zone of southwestern Saskatchewan. The SAM was comprised of three components: (1) a soils model that simulated soil and crop growth parameters; (2) an economic model that simulated land use and cropping decisions; and (3) a habitat model that calculated habitat and biodiversity parameters. These components were largely self-standing models comprised of important processes of the soil, economic and ecological sectors of the agroecosystem respectively. To simulate the co-evolutionary changes of the agroecosystem the component models were dynamically linked, based on a one year time step, through selected input and output parameters. The output of the component models reflect elements of the natural and man-made capital stock of the target agroecosystems and were used as sustainability indicators. The concept of strong sustainability was adopted in the analysis such that changes in these indicators signal changes in the relative sustainability of the system. The study focused on two types of simulations: (1) the relative sustainability of four ecodistricts was assessed using baseline simulations. This analysis highlighted the importance of biophysical constraints to the sustainability of an agroecosystem. These simulations indicated that the development of production technologies and policy initiatives, targeting agroecosystem sustainability, should explicitly consider the regional biophysical constraints faced by farms; and (2) the relative sustainability of a single ecodistrict subjected to economic (carbon credit and carbon tax policies) and environmental (climate change) perturbations was evaluated. These simulations highlighted the difficulty in identifying a single policy that leads to a sustainable agroecosystem. In general, policies that resulted in improvement in some components of the capital stock caused degradation of other components. The Identification of preferred policy, in terms of agroecosystem sustainability, requires a weighting of system effects based on societal preferences, ethical responsibilities, degradation thresholds and system co-evolution
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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