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Under the context of the essential role and growing importance of the rural environment in the development of a country, we focus on evaluating the economic theoretical potential of the rural environment that we consider to have been mismanaged during 1956-2010. For this purpose, in this paper we define, describe and explain the main concepts, as to be able to evaluate the economic potential of the rural development and further contribute to its improvement. The study focuses on the correlations between the population of working age, occupancy, unemployment and the wasted economic potential, putting forward a new concept, statistically valid, demographic named the absolute able overpopulation.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, options began to be widely employed in the main financial centres in Europe and the USA for trading in spot and futures markets. From 1921 onward, Keynes embarked upon investment in these derivatives mainly—but not exclusively—in the commodity markets, showing a true fascination for this method of speculation. This type of financial investment he pursued mainly in the 1920s, with only a few operations undertaken during the 1930s. The option markets in which Keynes traded were metals—in particular copper, lead, spelter and, especially, tin. Besides metals, Keynes dealt in options also in other commodity markets, such as rubber and linseed oil, and sparingly in ordinary stocks and government securities. In this paper we offer a reconstruction of Keynes’s speculative activity in commodity options, drawing on the archival material kept in the Keynes Papers held at King’s College, Cambridge. This reconstruction is, to the best of our knowledge, entirely new to the literature and aims to provide an analysis of this particular aspect of Keynes’s investment behaviour, investigating his capacity to predict market trends and offering a preliminary assessment of his performance.

The argument for effective financial regulation to curb financial activity and associated volatility in primary commodity markets is now more compelling than ever, in the context of the renewed increase in food prices. However, as in much other financial regulation, the devil is in the detail. This paper considers recent patterns in global food markets and discusses some of the implications of recent moves to regulate financial activity in commodity futures markets in the US and the EU. Specific regulatory issues are considered and alternative strategies are considered. JEL Codes: F02, F14, G18, N50, PSL Quarterly Review, V. 64, N. 258 (2011)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a modification of a standard four input production process where energy is used in an inefficient way due to partly unnecessary waste of energy. The changes in production efficiency investigated using stochastic frontier methods, show declining technical efficiency in livestock production and especially low marginal contribution of labor inputs. The number of workers, size of farm, and distance from nearest city are related to efficiency in agricultural production. It is well known that results from an environmental policy in response to global climate change are quite sensitive to the assumption on the rate of energy efficiency improvements. However, technical progress is traditionally considered as a non-economic variable in economic policy models. It is exogenous in most policy evaluations as well as in the theory of environmental economics.

This working paper provides a compilation of statistics on international wine consumption, production and trade from the mid-nineteenth century until the beginning of the Second World War. The statistical data is structured in three parts dealing with consumption, production and trade both at the world level and for a broad sample of countries. The data presented for Spain, France and Italy, the leading three nations in the wine market, are especially wide-ranging. En este trabajo se ofrece una compilación de estadísticas sobre el consumo, la producción y el comercio internacional de vino desde mediados del siglo XIX hasta el inicio de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Las datos estadísticos se organizan en tres partes: consumo, producción y comercio. Los datos corresponden tanto al conjunto del mundo, como a una amplia muestra de países. Dentro de estos, los que cuentan con mayor información son los más importantes en el mercado del vino: España, Francia e Italia.

International audience; Many countries are promoting biofuels as a substitute for scarce oil. This paper develops a dynamic model of land allocation between food and energy and shows how the model can be calibrated using standard optimization techniques. Some possible implications of the trade-offs between food and energy are discussed. Specifically, we show that the effect of mandates is mainly felt through increased land conversion, which increases indirect carbon emissions. Crude oil prices do not decrease significantly because of leakages.

Romania’s international agrifood trade increased significantly during the last decade, and mostly after the EU accession. Since 1990, the Romanian agrifood trade balance showed an almost continuous increasing deficit trend until 2008. In four years only, the trend reversed and in 2013, for the first time in the last two and a half decades, the agrifood trade balance turned positive. The present paper is analyzing the evolution of the trade evolution and its structure, separating the agrifood products in three categories: agricultural commodities, primarily processed products and secondary processed products. A higher ratio of processed products in exports is indicating an increased competitiveness, resulting from higher unit values incorporating more added value, and showing, at the same time, a higher development degree of the country’s food industry. The results for total trade show that the processed products represented at most 46% of the Romanian exports, and at least 63% of imports, indicating a low-competitive structure of the agrifood trade. The analysis is detailed for intra and extra-EU trade and by main partners and groups of products.

The principal objective of the present study is to explain the changes in the direction of agri-food trade flows during the second half of the twentieth century. Since the end of the Second World War, trade has tended to be concentrated among developed countries, breaking the pattern of complementarity among industrialized countries and developing countries from the first wave of globalization. Elsewhere, agricultural exports from developing countries to countries of similar income have significantly increased since the 1990s. To compare and explain the evolution of different trade directions, the present article estimates the gravity equation for the bilateral volume of agri-food trade, analyzed separately in four categories of trade flows based on the development level of countries. Specifically, we have used the UN-COMTRADE database to construct a data panel for bilateral trade among 30 reporting countries and 39 partner countries with a significant presence in international markets for the period 1963 - 2000. The following conclusions can be extracted from the present study. Firstly, while other types of trade, such as manufactures, enjoyed greater multilateral liberalization of their markets, strong market intervention caused them to base their growth on the proliferation and success of regional trade agreements in the North. As a result, agri-food trade concentrated progressively on developed economies. Secondly, the latest liberalization of some preferential trade agreements gave rise to new increases in agricultural trade, this time in South-South flows. Finally, the negative sign of income demand elasticity for imports of agricultural products from Southern countries demonstrates that the latter behaved like inferior goods and also explains why the export growth of such countries suffered a brake on such expansion.

We investigate the costs of transportation regulation using the example of agricultural markets in the United States. Using a large database of prices by state of agricultural commodities, we find that the coefficient of variation (as a measure of market integration between states) falls for many commodities until the First World War. We demonstrate that this reflected changes in transportation costs which in turn in the long run depended on productivity growth in railroads. 1920 marked a change in this relationship, however, and between the First and Second World Wars we find considerable disintegration of agricultural markets, ultimately as a consequence of the 1920 Transportation Act. We argue that this benefited railroad companies in the 1920s and workers in the 1930s, and we put forward an estimate of the welfare losses for the consumers of railroad services (i.e. agricultural producers and final consumers).

The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This article reviews and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in market distortions and the political-economy explanations that have been advanced. Based on a rich global data set covering a half-century of evidence on commodities, countries, and policy instruments, we identify hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the extent of market distortions and the conditions under which reform may be feasible. X-PublishedAs-Type: article X-PublishedAs-Journal: Journal of Economic Literature X-PublishedAs-Year: 2013 X-PublishedAs-Volume: 51 X-PublishedAs-Pages: 423-477

Recent distressing trends in climate change, population explosion and deforestation inspired this paper, which completes existing literature by providing empirical justification to hypothetical initiatives on the impact of population growth on forest sustainability in Africa. Using three instruments of forest exploitation, the study shows how rural, agricultural and national population growths affect forest-area and agricultural-land. In this particular study the findings indicate that instruments of forest exploitation do not explain changes in forest-area and agricultural-land beyond population growth mechanisms. Hence, population growth channels are a driving force by which forest-area and agricultural-land are depleted and expanded respectively. As a policy implication in the process of deforestation, a balanced approach is needed to take account of the interests of both; a green economy promoting sustainable development and the growing population needs.

This research argues that deep-rooted factors, determined tens of thousands of years ago, had a significant effect on the course of economic development from the dawn of human civilization to the contemporary era. It advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that in the course of the exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance from the cradle of humankind to various settlements across the globe affected genetic diversity and has had a direct long-lasting effect on the pattern of comparative economic development that could not be captured by contemporary geographical, institutional, and cultural factors. In particular, the level of genetic diversity within a society is found to have a hump-shaped effect on development outcomes in the pre-colonial era, reflecting the trade-off between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on productivity. Moreover, the level of genetic diversity in each country today (i.e., genetic diversity and genetic distance among and between its ancestral populations) has a similar non-monotonic effect on the contemporary levels of income per capita. While the intermediate level of genetic diversity prevalent among the Asian and European populations has been conducive for development, the high degree of diversity among African populations and the low degree of diversity among Native American populations have been a detrimental force in the development of these regions. Further, the optimal level of diversity has increased in the process of industrialization, as the beneficial forces associated with greater diversity have intensified in an environment characterized by more rapid technological progress.

s with downloadable PDF files of Discussion Papers are available on the Internet: http://www.ssb.no Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for analysis of multioutput agricultural production when the supply of water is uncertain. Specifically, we assume that the farmer operates as if the decision process takes place in two stages. In stage one the farmer decides how much land to allocate to each crop. However, in this stage he is uncertain about the supply of water during the growth period before harvest. In the second stage when the uncertainty is revealed he adjusts the quantities of (ex-post) input factors (given the allocation in the first stage). The production technology is assumed to be of the Leontief type. We also extend the model to the case with several seasons where one crop is cultivated throughout all season while the remaining crops are seasonal-specific. The empirical model is extended to allow for a particular version of bounded rationality in which the farmer is allowed to make optimization error. This implies that the estimation procedure is considerably simplified. Keywords: Multioutput agricultural production, Uncertain water supply, Land constraints, Continuous random utility model, Leontief technology.

International audience; En France, le concept d'exploitation agricole est le fruit d'une longue construction sociale ; les étapes successives de la démarche classificatrice et statistique sont inséparables des débats sociaux du 19e et 20e siècle. Mais certains estiment maintenant que l'"exploitation agricole" recouvre une vision passéiste de l'entreprise agricole. Sociologues et économistes ne peuvent plus faire l'économie d'une réflexion de fond sur la pertinence et le bien-fondé d'une révision de ce concept. L'observation de la diversité des formes d'exercice de l'activité agricole des ménages français montre en effet que la notion statistique d'exploitation agricole renvoie à des réalités économiques et sociales trop diverses pour qu'elle permette, à elle seule, de délimiter un secteur productif qui ait une existence institutionnelle et d'identifier les groupes sociaux qui seront, demain, l'objet de soutien des politiques de développement agricoles et rurales. En revanche, comme unité statistique élémentaire, le concept d'exploitation agricole offre la possibilité de disposer d'une unité de base commune pour dénombrer, repérer et construire des observations portant sur les différentes fonctions de l'activité agricole (production mais aussi rôle dans la gestion des ressources naturelles, utilisation du territoire, contribution à la cohésion économique et sociale, etc..) et éviter une fragmentation irréversible des résultats sur ces points. Dans cette perspective, la notion statistique d'exploitation agricole présente un intérêt renouvelé pour la conduite des nouvelles politiques de développement, agricole aussi bien que rural, et demeure un instrument indispensable pour les recherches en sciences sociales.