Risk is often perceived by farmers as being more formidable in new technologies emanating from agricultural research than in more traditional practices. Consequently risk may tend to act as an impediment to adoption of improved practices as well as a general friction on efficient use of...

In a recent reappraisal of evidence adduced for allocative efficiency in traditional agriculture, Dillon and Anderson employed a method based on a combination of traditional economic aspects and statistical aspects of estimated production functions. However, their reappraisal involved using...

Growth in agriculture depends on many things but one of the most important is investment in agricultural research. Decision making in the agricultural research policy area can only be aided by access to better information. This article overviews a recent endeavor to move policy dialogue beyond...

Rainfall during the germination, growing and flowering periods is a major determinant of wheat yield. The degree of uncertainty attached to a wheat-yield prediction depends on whether the prediction is made before or after the rainfall in each period has been realised. Bayesian predictive...

A problem with the use of flexible functional forms is that the estimated functions frequently violate the regularity conditions (eg, monotonicity, concavity) implied by economic theory. Sampling theory methods exist for imposing curvature conditions at all non-negative prices, but such methods...

Crop output can be defined as the product of area sown and yield. Given the existence of separate equations for explaining and predicting area sown and yield, in this paper we suggest predictors for output and derive expressions for the standard errors of the predictors. The methodology is...