Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics 178:The impact of farm income support on absolute inequality

This paper focuses on the impact of agricultural support policies on the distribution of farming incomes, using measures to characterise and quantify the redistributive effects that are based on the change in the absolute Gini index. The provision of support to Scottish agriculture is found to have been at best ineffective as a means to reduce the average size of income disparities between farms. Agricultural policy is further shown to have been inefficient as a redistributive tool because of the adverse distributional effect of the re-ranking of farms induced by the provision of support

The Impact of Farm Income Support on Absolute Inequality

This paper focuses on the impact of agricultural support policies on the distribution of farming incomes, using measures to characterise and quantify the redistributive effects that are based on the change in the absolute Gini index. The provision of support to Scottish agriculture is found to have been at best ineffective as a means to reduce the average size of income disparities between farms. Agricultural policy is further shown to have been inefficient as a redistributive tool because of the adverse distributional effect of the re-ranking of farms induced by the provision of support.Agricultural Policy, Income redistribution, Scotland, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics 093:On the comparative evaluation of agricultural income distributions in the European Union

The paper reports a set of operational rules for ranking income distributions that could be used, given appropriate data, to address a range of policy issues concerning the economic welfare of the agricultural community, the comparability of agricultural and non-agricultural incomes, and the extent and depth of poverty in farming. The rules are based on stochastic dominance procedures and are consistent with social preferences for higher incomes and a more equal distribution of income. Their application is illustrated by means of a comparative analysis of the farm family income situation in the member states of the European Union based on Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) data. The inadequacy of FADN data as a basis for inferences about welfare and poverty of farm households is stressed

A Toolkit for Exploring Affective Interface Adaptation in Videogames

From its humble beginnings back in the early 1960’s the videogame has become one of the most successful form of HCI to date. However if we look more closely at the interactions between the game and gamer it becomes evident little has changed since the advent of SpaceWar back in 1961. These interactions are for the most part static and thus predictable, given a particular set of circumstances a game will always react in one particular manner despite anything the player may actually do. Because of this the expected lifespan of a videogame is inherently dependant on the choices the videogame provides; once all possible avenues have been explored the game loses its appeal. In this paper we focus on adapting techniques used in the field of Affective Computing to solve this stagnation in the videogames market. We describe the development of a software development kit (SDK) that allows the interactions between man and machine to become dynamic entities during play by means of monitoring the player’s physiological condition

Labour Market Reform and the Evolution of the Racial Wage Hierarchy in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The central theme of this working paper is the way that the racial wage hierarchy evolved in South Africa over the period 1993 to 1999 amongst full-time regular employees of normal working age, but excluding those in the primary sector and the defence forces