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The world faces formidable, but manageable, challenges in achieving food security in a world growing beyond 9 billion people in the coming decades. Five big challenges will necessitate shifting innovation strategy to place greater emphasis on sustainable increases in diet quality, on total factor productivity ‐ not just crop yield ‐ growth, on social protection programs, on Africa, on post‐farmgate agri‐food value chains, on risk management, and on reducing the land and water footprint of food production. We must be progressive in both senses of the term, having faith in science as an engine of societal advance, and standing with marginalized populations.

The Dodd‐Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 aimed to improve the financial stability of the banking industry. This reform was intended to reduce the too‐big‐to‐fail practices for very large banks. However, it might also affect the performance of relatively small asset size banks with different lending portfolios. Using the Call Report data from 2006 to 2016, evidence suggests that the Dodd‐Frank Act has affected the estimates of cost efficiency and returns to scale measures of both big banks and small agricultural banks. Results indicate that Dodd‐Frank Act has increased cost efficiency, discouraged mergers, and encouraged product specialization for banks above the $50 billion asset size. However, none of these results hold for the banks just above the $10 billion asset size. This appears to suggest that Dodd‐Frank Act has mainly affected the economic measures of those very big banks that are subject to the more stringent regulations. Nevertheless, Dodd‐Frank has reduced agricultural banks' cost efficiency and increased incentives for mergers. In addition, the Dodd‐Frank Act has dampened the incentives for product diversification in agricultural banking. Likewise, evidence exists that this act has slowed productivity growth, efficiency, and technological change in agricultural banks. Taken together, Dodd‐Frank reduced consolidations in very big banks that are subject to greater oversight but adversely affected U.S. agricultural lending.

The interaction between US state‐level TFP growth and weather is investigated using growth‐accounting techniques. The focus is on examining how that interaction changed between the 1960s and the end of the twentieth century. An empirical approximation to the production frontier constructed using state‐level data and mathematical programming techniques is used to decompose observed state‐level agricultural TFP growth into four components: technical change, weather‐related shifts in the frontier, input/scale effects, and adaptation to the frontier. Technical change and adaptation to the frontier play a significant role in determining average state total factor productivity. Weather‐related effects differ across Climate‐Hub Regions but are of particular importance in the Midwest.

With the turn of the century, Australian agricultural productivity growth slowed dramatically. We investigate the connection between this slowdown and climatic factors by comparing regional‐level growth patterns before and after the advent of the Australian Millennium Droughts. The analysis incorporates climatic variates directly into the productivity accounting framework to reflect the stochastic nature of agricultural production, and measured productivity growth is decomposed into four components: technological change, weather‐related change, input‐scale adjustment, and diffusion (adaptation). Nonparametric productivity measurement and statistical techniques are used to quantify and examine the patterns of the observed productivity slowdown. The analysis suggests that the primary determinant of the slowdown is not a slowdown in technological innovation but climatic‐related changes in the pattern and rate of diffusion of technological advances.

The historical practice of widow chastity in China is regarded as an outcome of traditional Confucian thought. This study examines how economic factors played key roles in the formation of this cultural tradition by studying the causality between technological progress in the cotton textile sector and the increase in the number of widow chastity cases between the Ming and Qing Dynasties. We find that the incidence of widow chastity increased significantly with rapid technological change in the cotton textile sector and increased demands for female labor. This result remains robust when the issues of widow chastity selection and alternative economic and cultural channels are addressed.

In this paper, I focus on the contrast between doing elegant, or peer impressing applied economics, and relevant applied economics that develops solutions to real‐world problems. I emphatically applaud elegant economics but in this paper focus on how our profession can achieve relevance to those outside our profession. In particular, I examine several key areas of professional relevance. First, I examine how technological change can disrupt not only the industries we normally examine but also our profession. Second, I examine our dependence on available, quality data. From that perspective, I advocate for greater efforts and leadership with respect to data for our profession. Next, I examine our engagement with industry and our non‐Ph.D. graduates. This leads me to pose the question of whether we would gain from great efforts to engage non‐academic alumni of our departments? Finally, I draw upon my experiences with the policy makers to suggest we should walk a fine line between advocacy for our discipline, and science in general, while vigorously maintaining objectivity and nonpartisanship in our work.

We estimate the effects of agricultural technological progress on cropland expansion at various geographical resolutions, from the country level to the world as a whole, while formally accounting for the international interdependence of national supply responses. Evidence for these effects has thus far been scant, contributing to polarized perceptions about the potential for improving agricultural technologies as a means to slow down deforestation. We find that, in most countries of the world, growth in total factor productivity (TFP) is either uncorrelated or is positively associated with cropland expansion. Yet worldwide TFP growth have been an important source of global land savings. The divergence between the country-level and the global results is explained by the changes in production patterns as countries interact in international markets. Our preferred point estimate of the elasticity of global cropland to global TFP growth is -0.34. Moreover, we estimate that satisfying food demand from 1991 to 2010 without observed TFP growth would have necessitated an additional 173 million hectares, or close to 10% of the area covered by tropical rain forests.

This paper addresses an old and recurring theme in development economics: the slow adoption of new technologies by farmers in many developing countries. The paper explores a somewhat novel link to explain this puzzle -- the link between market access and the incentives to adopt a new technology when there are non-convexities. The paper develops a theoretical model to guide the empirical analysis, which uses spatially disaggregated agricultural production data from Spatial Production Allocation Model and Living Standards Measurement Study survey data for Nigeria. The model is used to estimate the impact of transport costs on crop production, the adoption of modern technologies, and the differential impact on returns of modern versus traditional farmers. To overcome the limitation of data availability on travel costs for much of Africa, road survey data are combined with geographic information road network data to generate the most thorough and accurate road network available. With these data and the Highway Development Management Model, minimum travel costs from each location to the market are computed. Consistent with the theory, analysis finds that transportation costs are critical in determining technology choices, with a greater responsiveness among farmers who adopt modern technologies, and at times a perverse (negative) response to lower transport costs among those who employ more traditional techniques. In sum, the paper presents compelling evidence that the constraints to the adoption of modern technologies and access to markets are interconnected, and so should be targeted jointly.

This work analyzes the research productivity of agricultural and life science faculty in U.S. Land Grant research universities from 1975 to 2005. Production function estimations that control for inputs and demographic characteristics reveal significant improvements after 1980 in faculty research productivity per unit time, especially in the non-top ten universities. Because, however, time available to faculty for research has decreased substantially in the past three decades, overall journal article output per faculty did not increase after the 1980s. Our findings demonstrate large productivity increases but raise concerns about the optimal allocation of faculty time.

Technological changes in agriculture tend to alter the mass associated with segments or components of the yield distribution as opposed to simply shifting the entire distribution upwards. We propose modeling crop yields using mixtures with embedded trend functions to account for potentially different rates of technological change in different components of the yield distribution. By doing so we can test some interesting and previously untested hypotheses about the data generating process of yields. For example: (1) is the rate of technological change equivalent across components, and (2) are the probabilities of components constant over time? Our results-technological change is not equivalent across components and probabilities tend not to have changed significantly over time-have implications for modeling yields. We find estimated conditional yield densities are quite different when unique trend functions are embedded inside the mixture components versus estimating the same mixture with detrended data. Also, we prove different rates of technological change in different components lead to nonconstant variance with respect to time (i.e., heteroscedasticity). We present two applications of the proposed yield model. The first application considers climate determinants of component membership, where our results are consistent with the literature for climate determinants of yields. The second application compares the proposed yield model to USDA's current rating methodology for area-yield crop insurance contracts and finds the proposed model may lead to more accurate rates.

Rural North America has undergone a major economic transformation over the past century due to labor-saving technological progress, reductions in transport costs, and rising household incomes. The results are greater rural economic diversity, selected rural population decline, increased rural--urban interdependence, emergent exurban areas, and amenity-led rural growth. We summarize key research insights and provide a selected review of the economics literature over the past 100 years with a focus on this economic transformation of rural places, its implications for rural communities, and key modeling innovations and applications. The many important contributions by agricultural economists are highlighted. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

Griliches' k-shift, a crucial parameter in the welfare evaluation of technological change, is shown to be equal to the radial rate of technological change plus a vector of commodity bias parameters obtained from the distance function. The analysis permits decomposition of sectoral productivity growth into productivity growth by commodity. The k-shifts estimated for wheat, corn, soybeans, and beef in U.S. agriculture indicate a decrease in the marginal cost of production of corn, soybeans, and wheat during the 1950--1993 years. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

Major legislative, legal, and technological changes paved the way for a period of remarkable growth in the patenting of life science research by U.S. universities in the 1980s and 1990s. Using a multiple-output cost framework and two decades of panel data on ninety-six universities, this article examines whether economies of scope and/or scale are present in university production of three major life science research outputs: journal articles, patents, and doctorates. The results show strong evidence of economies of scale in life science research production with mixed evidence of economies of scope between articles and patents. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

This article uses a unique data set provided by the Census Bureau and a translog cost function to empirically examine technological change in the U.S. poultry industry. Results reveal substantial scale economies that show no evidence of diminishing with plant size and that are much greater than those realized in cattle and hog slaughter. Findings suggest that consolidation is likely to continue, particularly if demand growth diminishes, and that controlling for plant product mix is critical to accurate cost estimates. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

Regional differences in total factor productivity, efficiency, and technological change in the Philippine rice sector are examined for the post-Green Revolution era. Malmquist productivity indices were constructed for 1971–90 and were decomposed into efficiency and technological change. The average annual Malmquist productivity growth was only slightly positive. Productivity growth was negative during the early 1970s, and was followed by a period of positive growth. Growth was negative again in the late 1980s. The period of positive growth coincided with the introduction of new rice varieties while the declines are likely to have been caused by intensification of rice production in lowland farming systems. Certain regions such as Central Luzon, Western Visayas, and Southern and Northern Mindanao had higher rates of technological change than others. This may be due to higher investments in infrastructure and education, increased adoption of tractors, and a better agroclimatic environment. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

finement of new commercial processes and products. The concept of a "natural technological trajectory" is a synthesis of heuristic evolutionary economic notions, generalized from numerous casestudy observations across many industries, that the ebbs and flows of technological change tend to follow particular pathways along which progress moves more quickly. Many of the interesting economic relationships that drive technological change in industries are influenced by the sequential emergence of incremental technological refinements over time and by the interaction between different currents of technological advance. The need to account for the complex and cumulative nature of separately evolving technologies in the agricultural biotechnology industry has led to the consideration of empirical methods that use patent data to identify and track the evolution of separate technological trajectories. Patent documents provide some of the best data available on R&D output (Griliches). However, a primary drawback of using patents to track the micropatterns of innovation is, of course, that not all new ideas are patented, especially given the differences in institutional significance of patents across the different sectors of the R&D economy, including universities, startup companies, and corporations. The examples that follow utilize a dataset of U.S. patents on biological inventions with relevance for crop agriculture. These methods to empirically observe technological trajectories have proven valuable for three reasons. First, the methods provide for a well-selected dataset, specific to the research question at hand, and minimizing, as much as possible, problems of selection bias, missi g data, and truncation. Second, these methods can allow for structural modeling of causal relationship between innovations. Third, the methods provide for the theoretically correct control of technology field effects in regression an lysis: all of the individual innovations contained in a single trajectory sample can be expected to arise from a common technological opportunity set, to have common intrinsic appropriability characteristics and face common external appropriability conditions, to face the same regulatory environment, and to face similar market demand.

An error correction model (ECM) of induced innovation, based on the two-stage CES production function allows direct tests of the inducement hypothesis, which are applied to U.S. data for 1880‐1990. The time series properties of the variables include a structural break in 1920, cointegration is established and an ECM constructed, which allows factor substitution to be separated from technological change. Causality tests show that the factor-price ratios and R&D are Granger-prior to the factor-saving biases of technological change. The inducement hypothesis is corroborated, and identified as one factor in the complex development of U.S. agriculture. Hayami and Ruttan’s (1985, p. 4) own description of induced innovation is “technical change that facilitates the substitution of plentiful (hence cheap) factors of production for scarce (hence expensive) factor inputs.” The testable implications are that there should be negative correlations between factor-price ratios and factor ratios, with the causality running from the first to the second, and that this should be the result of technical change rather than factor substitution. The relationship may hold either in the changes or in the levels, as Olmstead and Rhode point out. Several versions of this relationship between factor ratios and factor prices and numerous empirical studies are reported in Thirtle and Ruttan. In early cases the hypothesis is not clearly stated and the tests amount to no more

A generalized maximum entropy approach is adapted to empirically estimate crop-specific production technologies in Chinese agriculture. Despite a modest behavioral assumption about equal marginal returns of nonland inputs among crops, this method does not require price information, which is usually distorted in a centrally planned economy such as China. A multi-output technology for Chinese agriculture is estimated and input allocations for each province are recovered simultaneously. The estimated multi-output production technology and input allocations imply that China may have greater grain production potentials than previously thought. Copyright 2001, Oxford University Press.

Traditional measures of technological change, such as the rate of technical change, are based on producer-oriented prices. Consumer-oriented welfare measures such as the Hicksian variations are more appropriate measures of the ultimate benefits of technology, but they require knowledge of consumer valuations of outputs and inputs and the price impacts of the technological change. The general equilibrium analysis here evaluates these price impacts and shows how the welfare gain from technological change can be decomposed into the rate of technical change, plus an induced-price-change effect, plus the effect of any ad-valorem price distortions that exist in the economy. The graphic interpretation of these welfare effects suggests alternatives to the usual partial equilibrium social surplus measures of the gains from technological change.

Modern biotechnology will generate crops with higher yields and enhanced resistance to pests and diseases. In the case of perennial crops, the age composition of the present stand, the farmers' willingness to invest, and the yield profiles of old and new trees determine the speed of adoption of the new technology and the timing of the effects on supply and demand conditions. We adapt conventional welfare measures to account for these factors in the assessment of research induced supply shifts. The application to cocoa in Malaysia shows that consumers and adopting producers gain and non-adopters lose. Overall, 72% of the welfare gains go to the consumers. Copyright 2001, Oxford University Press.

Several nonparametric tests of technological change are proposed conditional on alternative maintained behavioral assumptions. The tests are simple as they require verification of axioms via binary comparisons that are analogous to those of the revealed preference theory. Our model allows a broad interpretation of technological changes, yet trivial rationalization of the data with either profit-maximization or cost-minimization behavior is excluded. The tests are applied to study the U.S. aggregate agricultural data, supporting the hypotheses of rankable and neutral Technological Variations. Copyright 1999, Oxford University Press.

This duality model is used to investigate the dynamic structure of vertically linked sectors of the U.S. beef industry. The model employed allows for explicit hypothesis tests of the adjustment process and technology change. Vertically related sectors of the beef industry are included to emulate the organizational structure of the industry. Results suggest that the cow-calf, feedlot, and beef processing sectors of the U.S. industry face significant adjustment costs. Another important finding is that imports may provide a way for the U.S. beef industry to adjust to short-run market changes. Copyright 1997, Oxford University Press.

only the globalization of markets and related institutional and economic change but also change in the long-stable assumptions, value beliefs, and institutions that sustain our basic unit of governance: the nation-state. This in turn transforms the way in which nations and private interests pursue their political objectives both domestically and internationally. We present the case that economic and technological changes are transforming the political role of the nation-state. The integration of national economies on a global and a regional basis imposes new constraints on the capacity of the nation-state to fulfill its traditional policy roles. At the same time, technological changes are transforming national politics by fragmenting political interests along increasingly narrow lines, thereby diminishing the nationstate's capacity to define and defend the national interest in the face of the escalating demands of rapidly proliferating interest groups. The result is that (a) the power of the nationstate is drifting upward toward increasingly complex networks of international institutions and nongovernment organizations and downward to subnational levels of government; (b) the c nflicting forces of global economic integration and proliferating interest group demands increase the transaction costs associated

Our objective in this paper is to explain a method to decompose the sources of total factor productivity (TFP) growth into technological progress and changes in technical efficiency within the framework of the varying coefficients frontier production function. An empirical application is demonstrated using the Chinese provincial-level agricultural data covering the period 1970–87. The results indicate that TFP growth in the prereform period was negative in twenty out of twenty-eight provinces and that it was positive in almost all provinces during the reform periods, while negative in sixteen out of twenty-eight provinces in the postreform periods of 1984–87. Copyright 1996, Oxford University Press.

Fixed effects production functions and stochastic production frontiers are estimated and used to decompose dairy farm output growth into technological progress, technical efficiency, and increased input use or the size effect. Unbalanced panel data for ninety-six Vermont dairy farmers for the 1971–84 period are utilized. The results show a 2.5% average annual increase in milk output. About 56% of this growth is attributed to the size effect and the remaining 44% to productivity growth. Technological progress contributed about 94% to total productivity growth, while improvements in technical efficiency accounted for only 6%.

The Weak Axiom of Profit Maximization and Weak Axiom of Cost Minimization were used to determine whether each of forty-nine New York dairy farms displayed behavior consistent with profit maximization or cost minimization. These were tested for each farm across eleven years of data, correcting for technological change using previously estimated nonparametric Malmquist productivity indices. The results indicate that some were moderately successful in maximizing profits, but more came closer to minimizing costs. Over half of the observations were within 10% of minimum costs.

The induced institutional innovation hypothesis postulates that new institutions are innovated to exploit profitable opportunities arising from institutional disequilibrium. The removal of legal restrictions on factor market exchanges after recent reforms in China resulted in institutional disequilibrium. This paper utilizes data from a household survey in China to explore (i) the relationship between the emergence of land, labor, and rental markets in a region and the distribution of factor endowments across rural households in that region, and (ii) the impact of hybrid rice on the emergence of factor markets in that region. The results are consistent with the induced institutional innovation hypothesis.

Time-series procedures are employed to determine the influence of technological change in inducing factor bias in U.S. agricultural production between 1948 and 1983. A dynamic measurement error model is used to link research expenditures to the unobserved technological change variable. Biasedness in labor and material factor shares is established.

In the traditional two-factor, two-sector Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (HOS) trade model, the factor price equalization theorem provides conditions under which free trade, which is assumed to equalize product prices across countries, also equalizes factor rewards. The Stolper Samuelson theorem relates changes in product prices to factor rewards. An increase in the relative price of the labor intensive product increases the real return to labor and re

A multi-market model of technological change in food production is used to simulate the long-run income distributional implications of differential diffusion of currently available wheat technologies in Pakistan. The results indicate that a research agenda emphasizing technologies suited to Pakistan's favored production environments would enhance overall production without compromising inter-group equity. It is found that when commodity prices are market determined, net consuming households are the major beneficiaries of technological change. However, in the more common situation of government intervention in markets for staple foods, net producing households are the principal beneficiaries of technological change.

This paper evaluates the welfare implications of the irrigation-induced technological change in rice production, based on the conceptual framework of Hayami and Herdt and using a modified formulation of the problem. The analytical model used incorporates demand and supply shifts, provides exact measures of changes in consumers' and producers' surpluses, and examines the implications for distributive justice in terms of impacts on incidence and severity of poverty and inequality in income distribution. The results of the analysis suggest that irrigation-induced technological change would significantly promote distributive justice.

Material prices have risen in food manufacturing, resulting in material productivity growth. This study estimates material productivity indexes for New Jersey's food-manufacturing sector. A 21% material productivity growth is indicated for the 1964–84 period. The mechanism of material productivity growth is also investigated. Results suggest that greater material efficiency is encouraged by rising material prices, wage rates, and regulation, and by declining food prices. Short-run impacts on material productivity are caused by input substitution; beyond-the-short-run impacts are caused by material-saving technological change. In some food-manufacturing subsectors, higher material prices may bring lower revenues to material suppliers.

The direction of causality between dairy farm size and productivity is examined for each state using multivariate Granger-causality tests. The results only partially support the view that technological change has caused increases in dairy farm size. The direction of causality appears to be more from size to productivity. Changes in productivity and average herd size appear driven by price changes.

The theoretical and empirical implications of a static and dynamic logistic diffusion model are compared. The dynamic model relaxes some assumptions of the static model by allowing for a flexible adoption ceiling, for changes in the technology, and for disadoption. Both models were used to estimate the diffusion of semi-dwarf wheat varieties in the United States. The dynamic model provides a better fit to the data and provides additional insights into the economic determinants of adoption. In particular, the importance of technological change in other areas (here, in fertilizer) on the diffusion path of an innovation was shown.

The purchase of new seed of a variety that a farmer is already growing, varietal replacement in general, and varietal choice during periods of rapid technological change are examples of seed replacement choices. A seed replacement choice differs from decisions about other inputs, such as fertilizer or labor, in that seeds can be repro- duced for the next crop season. Benefits from the purchase of new seed can continue for sev- eral years, and purchased seed is a self-sustain- ing input, although it is subject to depreciation. Replacement seed is, therefore, in some ways analogous to a capital item rather than a variable input. Agricultural economists, in general, have considered only the analysis of varietal choice with rapid technological change. Theoretical (Nowshirvani) and empirical (Herath, Har- daker, and Anderson; Gafsi and Roe) studies of varietal choice tend to model the farmer's de- cision as a single period portfolio allocation of land between modern and traditional varieties. Thus, the attributes of interest are yield, mo- ments of the yield distribution, and occasionally other varietal characteristics. Other approaches to analyzing farmers' choice of seed technology emphasize how a related input (fertilizer, tube- wells) affects the level and riskiness of return (Feder 1980, 1982). Prices, risk, the lumpiness of the associated inputs, and possible credit con- straints determine the portfolio choice over time in these models. In none of these approaches is the more general case of demand for replace- ment seed explicitly recognized. This paper proposes an analytical model of the demand for replacement seed. The model describes the factors that induce a farmer to re- place seed and the optimal frequency of new seed purchase given myopic and infinite time hori- zons. The model is applied to wheat seed de- mand in Pakistan. Conclusions, limitations, and possible extensions of the model are also con- sidered.

Recent rapid agricultural production growth in Chinese agriculture could be attributed to an increase in inputs, technological change, and institutional reform. An accounting approach was used to separate the relative contribution of these three factors. Institutional change, like the introduction of the household production responsibility system, has contributed to past growth in production. However, technological change is crucial to furthering production growth because of the limited potential for significant increase in the use of conventional inputs, in particular land. Continued institutional change must accompany corresponding technological changes.

nated sixty years of government programs that attempted to stabilize farm income and farm prices. Internationally, NAFTA and GATT are opening U.S. markets to increased competition. As a result, the potential for an impact on U.S. agricultural marketing policy and government institutions related to agriculture is a real possibility. Policy to facilitate marketing of farm commodities is more developed in the United States than in most economies. Agricultural development placed commodity marketing beyond the business infrastructure. Commercial and private market institutions were less developed, requiring a more formal and more developed set of public arrangements. The continental scope of markets included and involved major patterns of interregional competition. Instruments for the public management of a broad range of marketing issues were developed in U.S. policy facilitating farm commodity marketing. The Freedom to Farm bill of 1996, the establishment of NAFTA and GATT/WTO, the development of large multinational food manufacturing firms, and technological change all are acting to restructure the food and agricultural markets and marketing patterns. These developments raise important questions about needed changes in marketing policies to enhance competitiveness and societal well-being as these changes unfold. Hamm, Caswell, and Thompson and Sonka develop different aspects of the possible changes that might take place in marketing policies. I will address each paper individually. Hamm indicates at least four factors that are

It is about time that the agricultural economics profession began paying more attention to seafood and aquaculture marketing. It is about time, because aquaculture is probably the single most exciting development in the animal protein industry since the domestication of cattle. It is about time, since the revolution in aquaculture has been taking place for more than two decades, yet still has received very little attention from our profession. Aquaculture development encompasses an intriguing array of economic problems in addition to the marketing problems addressed in this session. It is characterized by rapid technological change and development that represents the transition from a wild-based industry to a farmbased industry, and it is taking place in a highly regulated and international environment. A broad range of species and technologies is being utilized in aquaculture production. For example, the technology used to raise oysters has similarities to but is also vastly different from the technologies employed in shrimp culture or those involved with salmon culture. Given its rapid growth, broad range of species, technologies, and international diversity, aquaculture is clearly one of the most intriguing natural-resource-based economic enterprises. This session emphasized the marketing aspects of aquaculture products. Let us now consider why marketing and demand analysis for the seafood industry and aquaculture are particularly interesting. First, the seafood industry is global. The United States imports most of its shrimp, fresh salmon, and seafood in general. Currently more than half the shrimp entering the United States is from aquaculture production, as is the majority of fresh salmon. Another factor that makes the study of seafood marketing fascinating is its exceptional heterogeneity. There are well over 200 commercial species currently being traded. A clam is significantly different from a piece of salmon, a swordfish steak, or canned tuna, much more different than, say, a piece of chicken compared to a pork chop or a piece of steak. In addition to the diversity characterized by the vast array of species and their origins, there is also diversity in product form. Some seafood is sold live at the retail level. Yet fish are also sold in highly processed forms, e.g., canned, breaded, and as surimi; crab analog products. It is unfortunate that agricultural economists chronically group s afood as if it were one homogeneous product. The structure of the seafood industry is undergoing metamorphosis as aquaculture production becomes a more significant factor in supply. Presently, the seafood industry is characterized by a large number of relatively small firms. As aquaculture develops, it has attracted the interest of larger firms, thus becoming vertically integrated and concentrated. This increased concentration and vertical integration will lead to more sophistication in the marketing of aquaculture products. The paper by Hanson, Herrmann, and Dunn addresses the determinants of seafood purchase behavior, with emphasis on consumer behavior. Seafood, like other animal proteins, is influenced by traditional factors of demand including own price, substitute price, income, perceptions, tastes, and preferences. The issue, which is not addressed here, is, to what degree do these factors influence seafood demand? Hanson, Herrmann, and Dunn (HHD) comment on supply constraints, suggesting two factors that are significant in limiting the potential for aquaculture. First, the industry "produces many different types of finfish and shellfish, fragmenting the genetic research efforts." Second, "fish health regulations and discharge perJames L. Anderson is professor in the Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at the University of Rhode Island.

sequence of low market integration and low substitutability between domestic and imported foods. In addition, if the geographical area over which these multipliers are calculated increases, the share of nontradables in the economy rises and multipliers are correspondingly larger. This leads the authors to praise the potential for a demand-led approach to both agricultural and industrial development, anchored in productivity gains in traditional exports. While the general proposition is reminiscent of the development strategies advanced by Mellor (1986), Adelman (1984), and Hazell (1984), and by now well accepted, the quantification of multiplier effects is inadequate. The model used makes unrealistic assumptions that systematically bias upward the size of the growth linkages induced by technological change in farm or nonfarm tradables. Denoting by T = tradables, T, = farm tradables, NT = nontradables, E = elasticity of supply response, ,qM = elasticity of substitution in consumption between output (q) and imports (M), and m, = income multiplier of an extra $1 of income from farm tradables, the key assumptions made by the authors are T: E = 0, , qM= o; and NT: E = o, YqM = a value which does not matter as long as E = oo. This yields local m, between 1.3 and 1.8 reported in table 2 of the Delgado et al. paper. Consider now the more realistic characteriza

Each of these papers deals with the application of economic analysis to fisheries management, specifically welfare analysis applied to allocation decisions and to computation of losses from damaged fisheries. The demands on economic analysis to help resolve allocation, natural resource damage, and other management issues have intensified over the past decade and these papers raise several issues common to one or several of these policy questions. The first question is, what should we count as net benefits from policy change in fisheries? One option is to take existing institutional configurations as given, and then measure actual rents in the system. There is a potential dilemma here because, if open access dissipates those rents, then net benefits will be zero before and after policy changes. I do not believe that this is a significant problem in real policy settings. In fact, rents aren't driven to zero in most fisheries because fisheries are no longer pure openaccess fisheries. Most fisheries are either (i) regulated open-access (open-entry but regulated with season, gear, and area controls), or (ii) regulated restricted-access (traditional controls and limited entry). Thus the extent to which rents are actually dissipated depends upon the nature of the regulatory system and specifically upon how well the system binds up input choices. In restricted-access fisheries, evidence suggests that inputs are bound up to some degree and hence license values provide a good measure of changes in rents in the system. What about regulated openaccess fisheries? Data suggests that even these fisheries are bound up by biological controls, are sluggish, and thus can and do sustain quasirents for considerable periods. There are two implications resulting from these observations. First, if we wish to use actual rents generated from existing institutions to measure net benefits from policy changes, in most cases there will be something that we can measure, either changes in license values, or in computed quasi-rents. Second, there are significant difficulties associated with forecasting long-run policy effects, because we need not only to forecast how the industry (technology) will evolve as a result of policy changes, but also how the institutional (regulatory) structure will evolve. This is necessary because actual rents are jointly det rmined by the interactions and behavior of both the industry and the regulatory system. Moreover, the forecasting problem is nontrivial, because it is likely that the process is dynamic and volutionary, with the industry responding to regulatory changes, followed by regulators responding to technology changes, and so on. An alternative to measuring what does emerge as rent is to measure what might emerge under ideal circumstances; ie. to sidestep the whole issue of forecasting the actual interaction and evolution of the regulated system and instead try to estimate what an efficient system might generate as rents. This principle of using (maximum) potential rents to benchmark policy changes is conceptually attractive since it is akin to policy analysis using potential Pareto improvements. In theory, this standard of comparison should prove easier to use, because it avoids having to fo cast the joint evolution of technology and regulatory structure discussed above. However, determining efficient technologies in practice may not necessarily be as straightforward as it might seem at first. For example, we might attempt to calculate potential rents by projecting how much of the existing fleet is necessary to harvest curr nt total allowable catches and then compute rents that could accrue to such a reduced fleet.

At the founding of the American commonwealth two hundred years ago, 95% of the population was engaged in agriculture. Today, less than 4% of the labor force remains in agriculture, the result of a massive shift of labor from the farm to the nonfarm sector. From a historical perspective, the agricultural changes which displace substantial numbers of farmworkers are nearly complete; estimates indicate that the share of the labor force in agriculture is expected to decline to 2% by 1985 (U.S. Dep. of Labor, p. 336). Just as agriculture has slowed the rate at which it disgorges its surplus labor into the nonfarm sector, renewed concern for the consequences of some agricultural changes is being expressed. The public agricultural research establishment is indicted for neglecting the human costs of the labor displacement which often accompany mechanization, for accelerating the pace of environmental and rural decay, and for encouraging the production of profitable but less palatable crops (California Assembly, Hightower). Although the values of critics may be questioned and the cogency of specific indictments disputed, the conflict between the drive for agricultural efficiency and the needs of farmworkers, the environment, and consumers promises to be prominent in the set of issues which '"seem likely to broaden and intensify" (Farrell, p. 786) rather than disappear. The absence of informed debate on the relative virtues of agricultural efficiency and workplace equity obscures the real interdependency between the social goals of efficiency and equity, permitting the enactment of incompatible policies designed for what are actually joint problems. This paper examines the benefits and costs which can be expected as a result of mechanizing the harvest of one of the most labor-intensive crops in America, flue-cured tobacco.' In 1972, about 141 million man-hours, 3% of all man-hours used in the production of crops, were used to produce fluecured tobacco on 0.5 million acres of land in the Southeast (Grise et al., p. 22; U.S. Dep. of Agriculture, p. 99). Most flue-cured tobacco labor (60%70%) is used in the six-to-eight-week harvest. Although mechanical innovations introduced since World War II already have reduced harvest employment, the introduction of the mechanical harvester and adoption of bulk barns is further reducing harvest labor demands. The mechanical tobacco harvester, developed with public monies, serves as an illustration of the research-displacement nexus in agriculture and permits the exploration of the various policy options available to alter the linkage. After a brief description of technological changes in the flue-cured tobacco industry, we derive an estimate of the average annual return which can be expected as a result of past and ongoing research outlays. In the third section of this paper, we explore the magnitude of potential adjustment costs likely to be incurred by displaced harvest labor. In the concluding section, we review the prospects for successfully implementing any of the proposed compensation or assistance schema. Throughout the paper, our focus remains on the efficiencyequity conundrum. While no ideal solution appears available, it is hoped that a discussion of the need for solutions can generate more research on a timely issue.

An optimal control model is used to determine the optimal steady-state forest stock in the Cote d'Ivoire. This stock is shown to increase with increases in the forestry returns relative to those in agriculture. Technological progress in agriculture and increases in the social discount rate serve to lower the optimal steady-state forest stock. Based on an estimated aggregate yield function, the optimal forest stock is shown to be most sensitive to changes in the social rate of discount. Assuming current (1985) technology, deforestation appears socially optimal only for values of the discount rate greater than 8%.

After two decades of relatively stable prices, stagnant export growth, and relatively cheap energy, U.S. agriculture underwent a series of dramatic changes in the 1970s. Commodity prices rose sharply in the mid-1970s in response to shortfalls in world grain production, devaluation of the dollar, and increased exports to the USSR. Actions in October 1973 and since by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) resulted in sharp increases in the price of petroleum. Prices of agricultural inputs derived from petroleum such as nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides also have risen. These and other economic forces (e.g., technological change, tax policies, and inflation) have encouraged established farmers to expand the size of their operations to take advantage of scale economies and to increase farm income. Other farmers, especially middle size operations and beginning farmers, have been confronted with sharply higher capital requirements as land values and other input costs have risen faster than commodity prices. Consequently, the structure of agriculture has continued to change, with fewer farmers producing an increasing share of total output (Economic Report of the President, pp. 30912; see also Martin and Spitze). Throughout the post-World War II era, cropland has been used more intensively with dramatic increases in land productivity. Rapid expansion in the application of fertilizer and agricultural chemicals has made a major contribution to the increase in land productivity (Economic Report of the President, pp. 30912). However, some of these chemicals have been found to be harmful to the environment and/or human health. And there are doubts about some still in use. In some cases their use has been banned or restricted. Also in recent

The impact of a technologically induced rightward shift in the supply function of a commodity grown and partly consumed by semisubsistence farmers is examined. In closed-economy, free market situations, the distribution of economic gains between consumers and producers depends on the proportional shift of the supply function, proportion of the commodity marketed, and elasticities of demand and supply for the commodity. Differences in adoption and marketable surplus between large and small farmers result in differential benefits, but over a range of parameter values, small farmers gain as much or more than large farmers when supply shifts faster than demand.