Socioeconomic Evaluation and Ranking of Infrastructure Projects

For most of the last century, the role of private and public sectors in the infrastructure projects were clear. For instance, public authorities were generally in charge of financing and building new infrastructures. Over the last decade, that position has begun to change. Faced with pressure to reduce public sector debt and, at the same time, expand and improve public facilities, governments and public authorities have looked to private sector finance, and have invited private sector entities to enter into long-term contractual agreements which may take the form of construction or management of public sector infrastructure facilities by the private sector entity, or the provision of services (using infrastructure facilities) by the private sector entity to the community on behalf of a public sector body. This paper deals with the new issues raised by the public-private partnerships system or, more generally, by any system in which the new infrastructure is partially financed by its users. Is there, in this case, a new economic rationality of public authorities? Particularly, is there an optimal way to rank projects? This paper discusses the choice by the public authority of the most efficient investing programme in irrigation water infrastructures. More specifically, it studies the optimal ranking of project implementation when these projects are partially self-financed by their own revenues. In this case, the optimal investment programme must be defined under a constraint of annual subsidies. This paper demonstrates that the optimal ranking is not necessarily the ranking of decreasing socioeconomic internal rate of return. This counter-intuitive result can be demonstrated by a general approach. Analytical calculations are not useful in this discrete problem because each programme is an ordered subset of projects. Therefore, there is no continuous variation linking the various programmes and the usual tools of optimization, such as differential calculus, are useless. Thus, we adopt here a discrete optimization analysis based on standard techniques in the physics area, such as Monte Carlo sampling.

Information and Communication technologies as agricultural extension tools

Knowledge and innovation society are becoming priorities to the welfare and quality of life of the rural population. This is based substantially on scientific and technological progress. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) accelerate rural development by contributing to more efficient management and rapid knowledge dissemination. ICTs are defined as a different set of technological tools and resources used for communication and for the creation, processing, dissemination, storage and information management. The rapid revolution in modern agriculture has led to investigations in many regions. One of them is the rural region of the prefecture of Pella that exists many years in the agricultural sector. The objective of this research is to evaluate the adoption of ICTs among farmers and determine the importance of agricultural extension as an information source in the region of Central Macedonia. For this purpose, the approaches of summary statistics in combination with multivariate statistical analysis techniques have been used. In particular, through the statistical package SPSS (v.16.0), there were employed two correlation methods: (a) the categorical regression model and (b) the two-step clustering. The primary research data were collected using a specifically constructed questionnaire, supplemented by personal interviews with farmers of the prefecture of Pella. The sampling result was to collect a general sample of 303 valid questionnaires.Categorical Regression, Central Macedonia, Information and Communication Technologies, Rural development, Two-step clustering

Drivers of consumer’s adoption of innovative food

Over the last years, food safety, health and environmental issues are a few among many other reasons that force consumers to adopt new innovative food products – organic, private label, genetically modified and functional – as part of their consumption. This spectacular shift of the consumption forwards “innovative” food products attracts the interest of the analyst as it can shed new light on consumer’s behaviour and on modeling and understanding better his long-term behaviour. Thus, this study attempts to investigate the factors that influence consumer’s decision in purchasing either traditional or new innovative products and to what extend this shift between those two groups of products is related to pre-defined elements. This is achieved by employing both descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis. Two-step cluster analysis was used to explore the different levels of innovative products adoption and a categorical regression model was estimated to determine the relation between consumer’s characteristics and willingness to adopt innovative products.adoption, consumption, food, innovative products, multivariate analysis., Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Assessment of Farmers' Attitudes Toward Pest Control Services Provided by Birds

Sustainable, conservation-oriented agricultural practices like pest regulation by insectivorous birds can decrease agrochemical use and enhance efforts on maximizing biodiversity. Previous research has shown that attracting insect-eating bird species can improve pest control in fruit crops and have a positive impact on fruit yield. We conducted a survey among fruit farmers to analyze the determinants of the potential adoption of biological pest control (BPC) provided by insectivorous birds on their farms. Quantitative analysis showed that their willingness to implement the innovative practice, favoring farmland wildlife, is influenced by both economic and noneconomic factors. Farmers’ overall interest in attracting birds to their farms was related to a variety of factors, including their understanding of the beneficial role of insectivorous birds in biodiversity, their desire to reduce production costs, and their personal characteristics. These factors influencing farmers’ motivations for participation in biological pest control should be taken into account to clarify the barriers that prevent, and the incentives that might draw them into adoption of an eco-friendly approach for insect pest control. Keywords: environmental benefits, innovative practice favoring farmland wildlife, farmers’ perception

Agro-Food Dynamics in a Region's Growth

Regional development depends highly in the allocation of developing funds -through development policies- among the various sectors of regional economies. In order to safeguard the most efficient use of investments analytical tools visualizing the economy as a whole in the form of a general equilibrium should be adopted. In this paper the role of agro-food sectors and agriculture in regional economic growth is examined. Despite the diminishing contribution of agriculture and agro-food sectors in the formation of an economy’s gross output and employment, their indirect influence upon the rest of the economy most of the times is not completely cast up. It is evidence that over the last two decades the share of agriculture in Greece’s GDP is substantially dropped. This fact many times used as a guide to support decisions in directing regional developing funds far from agriculture. On the other side, food sector’s share in processing industries is growing and its contribution and interrelation with other sectors has not been well assessed. Thus in the present paper, the indirect contribution of agro-food sectors in a region’s economy is measured and compared to non-agricultural sectors. Linkage relationships and interdependencies between food and non-food sectors are sought and their role in strengthening the regions growth is contemplated. The identification of such relationships is very important, as the path to development in some regions is very sensitive to sectoral interdependencies. To accomplish the aforementioned objectives, an Input-Output framework was employed in a regional level (Thessalia, Greece). Utilizing an employment based Location Quotient (LQ), developed by Flegg et al (1995) -the FLQ- the national I-O table is regionalized for the Greek (NUTS 2) region. The regionalization procedure was performed by following the hybrid GRIT technique. Employing the regional I-O table, linkage coefficients, that identify the dynamics of key sectors, were estimated. In addition the regional output generated due to food sector and non-food sector activity traced out to compare the relative dynamics. Results clearly demonstrate that the nexus of food non-food sectors is determinant in regional growth plans and the particular interdependencies, in every particular region, must carefully considered.

Socioeconomic Evaluation and Ranking of Infrastructure Projects

For most of the last century, the role of private and public sectors in the infrastructure projects were clear. For instance, public authorities were generally in charge of financing and building new infrastructures. Over the last decade, that position has begun to change. Faced with pressure to reduce public sector debt and, at the same time, expand and improve public facilities, governments and public authorities have looked to private sector finance, and have invited private sector entities to enter into long-term contractual agreements which may take the form of construction or management of public sector infrastructure facilities by the private sector entity, or the provision of services (using infrastructure facilities) by the private sector entity to the community on behalf of a public sector body. This paper deals with the new issues raised by the public-private partnerships system or, more generally, by any system in which the new infrastructure is partially financed by its users. Is there, in this case, a new economic rationality of public authorities? Particularly, is there an optimal way to rank projects? This paper discusses the choice by the public authority of the most efficient investing programme in irrigation water infrastructures. More specifically, it studies the optimal ranking of project implementation when these projects are partially self-financed by their own revenues. In this case, the optimal investment programme must be defined under a constraint of annual subsidies. This paper demonstrates that the optimal ranking is not necessarily the ranking of decreasing socioeconomic internal rate of return. This counter-intuitive result can be demonstrated by a general approach. Analytical calculations are not useful in this discrete problem because each programme is an ordered subset of projects. Therefore, there is no continuous variation linking the various programmes and the usual tools of optimization, such as differential calculus, are useless. Thus, we adopt here a discrete optimization analysis based on standard techniques in the physics area, such as Monte Carlo sampling

Hazardous Agrochemicals, Smoking, and Farmers’ Differences in Wage-Risk Tradeoffs

This paper utilizes the theory of compensating differentials for job risks from the labor economics literature to evaluate farmers’ differences in wage-risk tradeoffs. In the context of job risks, the theory predicts that farmers who place a lower value on health status are willing to work for lower compensation on a risky job. The aim of the paper is to evaluate how the observed wage-risk tradeoff is affected by individual heterogeneity in risk preferences, by acknowledging variations in farmers’ revealed attitudes toward risk, both in job-related and non-job activities. The job risk measure employed is self-reported job risk of low back pain, the most recurring health risk faced by farmers. The job-related risky activity is the application of hazardous agrochemicals. The non-job activity is smoking. The primary finding of the study is that individual heterogeneity in risk attitudes is an important determinant of the risk premium workers receive, i.e., individual differences in other health-related activities are influential determinants of the observed wage-risk tradeoff. Keywords:agrochemicals, smoking, farming job risk, compensating differentials, risk preferences, health impairment, Agribusiness, Farm Management, Health Economics and Policy, Labor and Human Capital,

The Role of Agriculture in Economic Growth: A Comparison of Mediterranean and Northern Views in Europe

The main objective of this paper is to identify the causal relationship that exists between agricultural value added per worker and Gross Domestic Product per capita in Europe. More specifically, the role of agriculture in economic growth is examined with special emphasis to the differences and similarities among Mediterranean and Northern countries. In order to examine short-run and long-run relationships, recent methods of linear co-integration are employed while the role of agricultural value added in economic growth is also examined by Granger causality tests. Results show a bi-directional relationship between agricultural value added and economic growth in the northern EU countries and only in one Mediterranean country. From a policy point of view, this relationship is of crucial importance since it can facilitate successful economic decisions. Taking into consideration that the role of agriculture in economic growth is an issue that always attracts the interest of scholars, this research could be prove extremely interesting and useful. Especially for this period of economic crisis, when the whole growth approach is reexamined and reevaluated, the research findings provide evidence that agriculture can lead as an engine of growth in several EU countries and can play stabilizer's role in the whole EU economy

Agro-Food Dynamics in a Region's Growth

Regional development depends highly in the allocation of developing funds -through development policies- among the various sectors of regional economies. In order to safeguard the most efficient use of investments analytical tools visualizing the economy as a whole in the form of a general equilibrium should be adopted. In this paper the role of agro-food sectors and agriculture in regional economic growth is examined. Despite the diminishing contribution of agriculture and agro-food sectors in the formation of an economy's gross output and employment, their indirect influence upon the rest of the economy most of the times is not completely cast up. It is evidence that over the last two decades the share of agriculture in Greece's GDP is substantially dropped. This fact many times used as a guide to support decisions in directing regional developing funds far from agriculture. On the other side, food sector's share in processing industries is growing and its contribution and interrelation with other sectors has not been well assessed. Thus in the present paper, the indirect contribution of agro-food sectors in a region's economy is measured and compared to non-agricultural sectors. Linkage relationships and interdependencies between food and non-food sectors are sought and their role in strengthening the regions growth is contemplated. The identification of such relationships is very important, as the path to development in some regions is very sensitive to sectoral interdependencies. To accomplish the aforementioned objectives, an Input-Output framework was employed in a regional level (Thessalia, Greece). Utilizing an employment based Location Quotient (LQ), developed by Flegg et al (1995) -the FLQ- the national I-O table is regionalized for the Greek (NUTS 2) region. The regionalization procedure was performed by following the hybrid GRIT technique. Employing the regional I-O table, linkage coefficients, that identify the dynamics of key sectors, were estimated. In addition the regional output generated due to food sector and non-food sector activity traced out to compare the relative dynamics. Results clearly demonstrate that the nexus of food non-food sectors is determinant in regional growth plans and the particular interdependencies, in every particular region, must carefully considered

The adoption of water saving irrigation practices in the Region of West Macedonia

The use of irrigation water for agricultural production requires innovative and sustainable research and an appropriate transfer of water saving technologies. The main aim of this paper is to explore the irrigating behaviour of farmers examining factors affecting their decision to adopt novel water saving practices. In order to achieve the above aim both summary statistics and multivariate methodologies are employed. In particular, a two-step cluster analysis was used to explore the different adoption levels of water saving practices and a categorical regression model was estimated to explain this variation. Data were collected through a survey addressing 400 irrigators, carried out in 2008 in a typical Greek rural area. Results show that although respondents have already adopted several water saving practices the current irrigated agriculture cannot be sustained in a sustainable manner.adoption-diffusion, extension, irrigation, water saving, water policy, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,