Some small-holders are able to generate reliable and substantial income flows through small-scale dairy production for the local market; for others, a set of unique transaction costs hinders participation. Cooperative selling institutions are potential catalysts for mitigating these costs,...

Increasing competition for water across sectors increases the importance of the river basin as the appropriate unit of analysis to address the challenges facing water resources management; and modeling at this scale can provide essential information for policymakers in their resource allocation...

Expenditures on agricultural research in the public sector, including the International Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs) have stagnated and in some cases, declined sharply in recent years. This has focused attention on issues of efficiency of agricultural research systems, especially the...

This paper presents an alternative approach to the measurement of technical change. It is based on the latent variable level of technology that enters explicitly the input demand system and on a hypothesis about the innovation generating process. By adding measurement error equations, the...

This paper presents an analysis of endogenous institutional innovations that have recently emerged in the agroindustrial zone of Chincha, on the coast of Peru. These innovations include: (1) contracts between agroindustrial firms and large farmers, introduced by the firms themselves to assure...

This note generalizes a finding about the necessary and sufficient conditions for research to generate greater benefits in the presence of distortions and highlights a significant source of bias in conventional cost-benefit calculations. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

In many arid and semi-arid regions whether or not to desalinate seawater has long been a non-issue and policy debates are focused on the timing and extent of the desalination activities. We analyze how water scarcity and demand structure, on the one hand, and cost reduction via R&D programs, on...

Organic conversion subsidies used in Europe are less likely to be politically acceptable in the United States, where organic agriculture development is market-driven. Persistent barriers to conversion in the United States include limited availability of and access to production and market...

A common approach in modeling negotiations is to apply game theory to single issues. Recent work has suggested that the complexity of international negotiations can be better modeled by linking independent games. Successful linking is possible when the linked issues have compensating asymmetry...

Agricultural water conservation statutes are emerging in the West encouraging private irrigators to improve on-farm irrigation efficiency as a basinwide conservation measure. We investigate whether private improvements promote the economic efficiency and conservation of water use basinwide under...