Based on the well known Karhunen–Loève expansion, it can be shown that many omnibus tests lack power against “high frequency” alternatives. The smooth tests of  Neyman (1937) may be employed to circumvent this power deficiency problem. Yet, such tests may be difficult to compute in many...

The outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in 1997 has resulted in significant losses to Taiwan's hog industry which was the most important industry in Taiwan's agricultural sector at that time. Hog farmers have suffered great losses due to the cost of slaughtering infected hogs and reduced...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the economic and environmental impacts of planting energy crop on set-aside acreages in Taiwan. To do so, a Taiwan Agricultural Sector Model (TASM) was built and the data parameters of energy crop were incorporated into this model in order to simulate the...

Tariff escalation becomes one of the major issues in the new Doha Round negotiation because it is viewed as a stumbling block to the industrialization development for the developing countries. When tariffs on products escalate with the stage of processing, the effective rate of protection, or...

A panel dataset of 29 provinces in China is used to analyze the productivity growth in China's agricultural sector over the period 1990-2003. We compute the output-oriented Malmquist productivity indexes and their decomposition using a sequential data envelopment analysis approach. The results...

After decades of strong economic growth, industrialization and rising living standards, China has become a dominant player in commodity markets. This study attempts to shed light on the role of China in global commodity price dynamics.

Following the spirit of the enhanced Russell graph measure, this paper proposes an enhanced Russell-based directional distance measure (ERBDDM) model for dealing with desirable and undesirable outputs in data envelopment analysis (DEA) and allowing some inputs and outputs to be zero. The...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the potential market price for the transfer of water among sectors in the Northern Taiwan region. This region is the major semiconductor and information technology product manufacturing area in Taiwan and plays an important role in contributing to...

A multi-activity DEA model with variable returns to scale is proposed to provide information on the efficiency performance of organizations with inputs shared among several closely-related activities. The model is applied to study the case of 279 farmers’ cooperatives in Taiwan. The results...