Energy, greenhouse gas emissions and irrigated agriculture

On-farm energy efficiency is becoming a significant issue for highly mechanised irrigated agricultural industries due to rising energy costs and concern over greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Energy represents a major cost and one of the fastest growing input costs to primary producers. The Australian cotton growing industry is highly mechanised and heavily reliant on fossil fuels (electricity and diesel). Within highly mechanised farming systems such as those used within the cotton industry, machinery costs can represent 40 – 50% of the cotton farm input costs. Given the major dependence on machinery (direct energy inputs) and rising energy costs, energy use efficiency is an emerging issue for the Australian Cotton Industry. Both previous and current work undertaken by the National Centre for Engineering in Agriculture (NCEA) is studying direct on farm energy use which involves a number of case study cotton farms to understand the contribution of direct energy use to cotton production and greenhouse gas emissions. The results from this work show that energy use varies depending on the cropping enterprise and the farming system and that there are significant opportunities to reduce energy and costs. In comparison the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) from direct energy use can be similar and in fact greater than the GHGs generated by nitrogen based fertiliser

Central bank intervention and overnight uncovered interest rate parity

This paper considers the impact of U.S. and German central bank intervention on the risk premium in forward foreign exchange markets.Foreign exchange - Law and legislation

The risk premium in forward foreign exchange markets and G-3 central bank intervention: evidence of daily effects, 1985-1990

Evidence that forward rates for foreign exchange are not unbiased forecasts of future spot rates suggests a time-varying risk premium. However, there is little evidence that the forecast error is related to fundamentals, although most investigations have lacked high-frequency data. In this paper, we use daily exchange-rate and official Federal Reserve intervention data to test for an impact of intervention on the forecast error. This paper extends recent analyses of daily changes in exchange rates by Baillie and Bollersev (1989) and Hsieh (1989) to the daily forward-rate forecast errors for the dm/US$and yen/US$ rates. We estimate an MA(21) process and utilize GARCH with a conditional student-t distribution. We find that 1) U.S. purchases of dollars on day t-1 affect the day t forecast error (ft-Et[st+k]), 2) there are day-of-the-week effects in the conditional variance, and 3) for the yen/US$ rate, there is GARCH-in-mean. These findings provide some support for considering intervention as a channel through which fundamentals influence risk premiaannel through which fundamentals influence risk premia.Foreign exchange - Law and legislation ; Risk