Can We Feed the World?: Food Production, Input Prices, Trade Restrictions and Technological Change, 1961-2010

The research completed by Hayami and Ruttan in 1985 pioneered induced innovation research using available data to analyze relative endowments and accumulation of land and labor as critical elements in understanding patterns of agricultural change. Hayami and Ruttan’s analysis was based on 43 countries and 20 years, 1960 through 1980. My research extends their analysis to incorporate information from 129 more countries and a longer time frame of 50 years. The data on agricultural inputs and outputs are compiled from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and FAO yearbooks. I supplement the FAO data with wage information from the International Labour Organization wage series and Oostendorp’s (2012) harmonized wage series based on household datasets across many countries. The production process of the 172 countries is explained well by a Cobb-Douglas form. This is convenient because marginal and average products are proportional, which lend themselves to a graphical presentation of Neoclassical production theory. Following the original Cobb-Douglas (1928) strategy, I can illustrate: the tradeoffs between labor and capital in agricultural production in an empirical isoquant, how relative wages affect capital labor ratios across countries, and how labor demand responds to wages. In addition, two-dimension scatter plots of inputs including labor, land, draft animals, tractors, and fertilizer indicate whether these inputs are complements or substitutes in production. Finally, because I cannot reject constant returns to scale, the data lend themselves to estimation of scale and substitution effects using the fundamental law of derived demand. Since I am analyzing the data over an extended time frame, I can measure productivity gains in world agriculture over the last 50 years. I will be able to test if technical change conserves or uses more labor, land, or capital. I will also be able to test whether the pace of technical change in agriculture is influenced by the country’s trade protection policies. My findings on productivity growth will be compared to the results in recent papers by Ball, Schimmelpfennig, and Wang (2013), Gollin, Lagakos, and Waugh (2012), Herrendorf and Schoellman (2011), and Pardey, Alston, and Kang (2012)

The World’s Christians:

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/firstfruitspapers/1095/thumbnail.jp

Customised commodity derivates; the case of natural gas in the Dutch horticulture sector

Financial banks in the Netherlands are developing customised derivatives for the agriculture industry to decrease the volatility of input or output prices. These derivatives can also be attractive for Dutch agriculture producers because a big part of the business risk in agriculture is caused by fluctuating commodity input and output prices. This report provides insight on how customised derivatives can be constructed and what the advantage is for a farmer. This insight is given by a simulation of the natural gas market for horticulture producers in the Netherland

Dynamic RSA for the evaluation of inducible micromotion of Oxford UKA during step-up and step-down motion

Orthopaedics, Trauma Surgery and Rehabilitatio

A postmortem study suggests a revision of the dual-hit hypothesis of Parkinson's disease

The dual-hit hypothesis of Parkinson's disease (PD) originally postulated that a neurotropic pathogen leads to formation of alpha-synuclein pathology in the olfactory bulb (OB) and dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus (DMV) and then invades the brain from these two entry points. Little work has been conducted to validate an important underlying premise for the dual-hit hypothesis, namely that the initial Lewy pathology does arise simultaneously in the OB and the enteric nervous system (ENS) plexuses and DMV at the earliest disease stage. We conducted a focused re-analysis of two postmortem datasets, which included large numbers of mild Lewy body disease (LBD) cases. We found that cases with alpha-synuclein pathology restricted to the peripheral autonomic nervous system and/or lower brainstem (early body-first LBD cases) very rarely had any OB pathology, suggesting that Lewy pathology commonly arises in the ENS without concomitant involvement of the OB. In contrast, cases with mild amygdala-predominant Lewy pathology (early brain-first LBD cases) nearly always showed OB pathology. This is compatible with the first pathology being triggered in the OB or amygdala followed by secondary spreading to connected structures, but without early involvement of the ENS or lower brainstem. These observations support that the pathologic process starts in either the olfactory bulb or the ENS, but rarely in the olfactory bulb and gut simultaneously. More studies on neuropathological datasets are warranted to reproduce these findings. The agreement between the revised single-hit hypothesis and the recently proposed brain-first vs. body-first model of LBD is discussed.Peer reviewe