Understanding China\u27s Soybean Boom from a Global Perspective

China’s soybean demand boom in the past two decades has been very dramatic. It involves socioeconomic and environmental interactions of multi-coupled systems. Over this period, China doubled its GDP, and the ensuing income growth generated strong growth in the demand for livestock products -- a major consumer of soybean meals. In addition, the goal of producing more meat and milk boosted protein content requirements in feed formulations and intensified China’s soybean meal demands. Brazil and Argentina stepped in to satisfy this increased demand. In the case of Brazil, rapid technical change, coupled with the expansion of cultivated area, played a key role in meeting the increased soybean demand in China’s global soybean boom. In 2011, Brazil became the largest soybean supplier for China, and soon in 2013, it overtook the US as the leading global soybean exporter. Soybean trade offers a notable instance of the emerging “telecoupling” concept – China, Brazil and the US closely interact with each other across distances. Chapter 2 aims to bridge agricultural trade with this telecoupling concept. The goal of Chapter 2 is to understand the historical soybean boom by focusing on the supply-demand-trade nexus of these three countries with a modified version of the GTAP-BIO model. We decompose historical changes into five groups of socio-economic drivers – macroeconomic growth, soybean productivity, other crop productivity, government policies, and pasture and forestry changes – quantifying each driver’s contributions to soybean trade, production, and land use changes over 2004-2011.We find that China’s macroeconomic growth boosted soybean production and exports from Brazil and the US, whereas macroeconomic growth in the latter two regions actually dampened soybean exports over the 2004-2011 period under examination. Brazil’s strong soybean productivity growth over this period, allowed that country to become dominant in the global soybean market. It also had strong spillover effects, displacing the US in the Chinese market and reducing overall growth in soybean output in the US. This strong soybean productivity growth also contributed to cropland expansion in Brazil. We introduce Genetically Modified (GM) and non-GM soybeans into our modified version of the GTAP-BIO model, which requires new trade elasticity estimates, especially the elasticity between GM and non-GM soybeans. However, such estimates are missing from the existing literature, and current trade data does not distinguish GM and non-GM varieties. In this dissertation, we treat soybeans from countries that predominantly export GM and non-GM varieties as GM and non-GM soybean bundles. In Chapter 3, we apply a structural gravity model to estimate three parameters: elasticities of substitution across GM and non-GM soybean bundles, respectively, and substitution between nested constant elasticity of substitution (CES) bundles of GM and non-GM soybeans. Following the Armington assumption, we employ a single nest CES structure for the elasticities of substitutions among each soybean bundle and a nested CES structure for the elasticity of substitution between GM and non-GM soybean bundles by using Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimators. Our estimates show that the elasticity among GM soybean bundles is as high as 29, indicating GM soybeans are homogeneous productions. The elasticity among non-GM soybean bundles is lower at 12. Although varieties of non-GM soybean bundles are substitutable, their qualities are differentiated by its origins. Low substitutability between GM and non-GM soybeans at 0.4 implies that GM and non-GM soybean bundles are viewed as poor substitutes by countries. By applying the historically-validated and well-tuned GTAP-BIO model from Chapter 2 and the trade elasticities estimated from Chapter 3, we aim to understand soybean boom from the supply side and investigate how the US lost its lead in the global soybean trade. We decompose changes of two main indices – the US/Brazil soybean production ratio and the US/Brazil soybean exports to China ratio – into a more detailed specification of socio-economic drivers. By pinpointing negative and positive drivers, we shed light on the factors driving to the US “losses” and “gains” in soybean exporting to China over 2004-2011 and provide insights on future soybean trade patterns

Determinants Of Energy Efficiency Across Countries

With economic development, environmental concerns become more important. Economies cannot be developed without energy consumption, which is the major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Higher energy efficiency is one means of reducing emissions, but what determines energy efficiency? In this research we attempt to find answers to this question by using cross-sectional country data; that is, we examine a wide range of possible determinants of energy efficiency at the country level in an attempt to find the most important causal factors. All countries are divided into three income groups: high-income countries, middle-income countries, and low-income countries. Energy intensity is used as a measurement of energy efficiency. All independent variables belong to two categories: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative variables are measures of the economic conditions, development indicators and energy usage situations. Qualitative variables mainly measure political, societal and economic strengths of a country. The three income groups have different economic and energy attributes. Each group has different sets of variables to explain energy efficiency. Energy prices and winter temperature are both important in high-income and middle-income countries. No qualitative variables appear in the model of high-income countries. Basic economic factors, such as institutions, political stability, urbanization level, population density, are important in low-income countries. Besides similar variables, such as macroeconomic stability and index of rule of law, the hydroelectricity share in total electric generation is also a driver of energy efficiency in middle-income countries. These variables have different policy implications for each group of countries

Examining the Effects of Selected Computer-Based Scaffolds on Preservice Teachers\u27 Levels of Reflection as Evidenced in their Online Journal Writing

This study used explanatory mixed methods to examine the effects of two computer-based reflection writing scaffolds, question prompts and writing process display, on preservice teachers’ levels of reflection in their online reflective journal writing. The scaffolds were embedded in a system simulating the Professional Accountability Support System Using a Portal Approach (PASS-PORT). The outcome measure was the level of reflection achieved in participants’ writing. The researcher collected data at the College of Education of a major southern university in the United States. Participants were undergraduate students enrolled in a technology integration course in fall 2007. Sixty-five preservice teachers participated in quantitative phase of the study; sixteen out of the 65 preservice teachers were purposefully selected to participate in qualitative phase of the study. The majority of the preservice teachers were white females between the ages of 20-29 in their junior year. During the quantitative phase of the study, participants in control group and two treatment groups were randomly and evenly assigned to one of three different Web pages associated with their treatment conditions. The participants reflected on a critical incident that happened during their practical teaching. Two raters, blind to the participants’ treatment conditions, coded the highest level of reflection achieved in their writing samples using the reflection rubric developed by Ward and McCotter (2004). The researcher employed ANOVA to assess the group differences in the highest level of reflection reached and in the length of the reflective writing in the number of words. The alpha level was set at .05 for all analyses. During the qualitative phase, the researcher conducted open-ended interviews with the participants as a follow-up to their reflection writing. The participants’ reflection writings and interviews served as data sources. Miles and Huberman\u27s (1994) data analysis procedures guided the qualitative data analysis. The quantitative results indicated that computer-based scaffolds significantly enhanced preservice teachers’ levels of reflection in their online journal writing. Preservice teachers who used the scaffolds wrote longer reflection than those in the control group. Correlation analysis revealed that there was a positive relationship between the level of reflection and the length of journal writing. Three overarching factors emerged from the qualitative data analysis that explained how and why the computer-based scaffolds enhanced their reflective journal writing. The factors included (a) the specific requirements conveyed in the scaffolds; (b) the structure of the scaffolds; and (c) the use of the critical incidents to anchor reflective journal writing. How to improve preservice teachers’ critical reflection capability and skills remains an actively debated topic. Recent years have witnessed an emergence of research and development in Web-based educational systems to help prepare highly qualified teacher candidates. However, the articulative/reflective attribute of meaningful learning does not seem to be evident in most of these systems. Although there is considerable research on the potential for embedding scaffolds in technology-enhanced learning environments, mechanisms intended to facilitate reflective practice in such environments also seems to be lacking. In order to help fill this gap, it is hoped that the analyses and results of the current study can be used as a building block for research on how to leverage the affordances of computer-based scaffolds to enhance preservice teachers’ reflective practice in technology-enhanced educational systems

Cone-Henig Subdifferentials of Set-Valued Maps in Locally Convex Spaces.

In locally convex spaces, the concepts of cone-Henig subgradient and cone-Henig subdifferential for the set-valued mapping are introduced through the linear functionals. The theorems of existence for Henig efficient point and cone-Henig subdifferential are proposed, and the sufficient and necessary condition for a linear functional being a cone-Henig subgradient is established