CHANGES IN AGRICULTURAL MARKETS IN TRANSITION ECONOMIES

Economic reform in the transition economies of the former Soviet bloc has transformed the volume and mix of these economies' agricultural production, consumption, and trade. Output drops in most countries have ranged from 25 to 50 percent. The livestock sector has been hit particularly hard, all but eliminating U.S. grain exports to the region. This report concludes that the output decline has been an inevitable part of market reform and that the main goal of agricultural policy in the transition economies should not be to return output to pre-reform levels but to increase the productivity of input use. Although reform has created a food security problem in some countries, the cause of the problem is not insufficient food supplies, but rather inadequate access to food by segments of the population and regions within countries.Russia, Ukraine, former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern European countries, transition economies, agricultural production, livestock sector, food consumption, trade, policy reform, productivity, International Relations/Trade,

Vertical coordination, rent distribution, and development

Vertical coordination has grown strongly in global supply chains. Local suppliers in developing countries engage in complex contracting with companies selling into high-income markets - either domestically or internationally. These contracts not only specify conditions for delivery and production processes, but also include the provision of inputs, technology, management advice etc. This paper analyzes how weak contract enforcement institutions and imperfect factor markets are affecting vertical coordination in development, and what the implications are for income creation and rent distribution

Land Rental Markets and Household Farms in Transition: Theory and Evidence from Hungary

This paper analyses the detfirminants of household firms?participation in land rental markets in transition countries and what affects their access to land through rental markets. We derive several theoretical hypotheses on the impact of households?management ability, land endowment, land quality and prices, transaction costs in the land market, rural credit and labour market constraints. We test the hypotheses combining a representative dataset on land rental activities of more than 1,400 Hungarian household firms with data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. We find that land rental markets reallocate land to households with better firm management capacities and less endowed with land. Households combine buying and renting of land to extend their firms. The continued domination of large firm organizations in some regions restricts household's access to land. Rural credit and labour market imperfections have an important impact on land rental markets

Rational Ignorance and Negative News in the Information Market

While the availability of infirmation has increased rapidly, the public is still considered poorly infirmed. This paper contributes to the emerging field of media economics by studying how the demand side of the media market affects news production and consumption. We show that consumers are likely to remain imperfectly infirmed on most issues and that negative news coverage is likely to dominate positive news stories because of demand side effects

On the Political Economy of Land Reforms in the Former Soviet Union

This paper provides a set of hypotheses to explain differences in the procedures and progress of land refirms among FSU countries. The first factor is the historical legacy of the countries and their institutions. Demand for land privatization was weak except in countries and regions where collectivization was imposed only after the second World War. Another factor is technology: countries with labor-intensive agricultural systems are characterized by more radical land refirms and decollectivization. The domination of nomadic pastoral grazing systems in Central Asia reinforces the technology factor. The last factor is politics: further political refirms may be needed as a prerequisite for progress in land refirms in the countries lagging far behind in land refirms

Building Sustainability: A Review Of Company Performance In The Commercial Real Estate And Property Sector

The commercial real estate and property sector is a vital part of the Australian economy. Compared to global peers, property companies in Australia and New Zealand are considered to be at the front of the pack in terms of acknowledging, measuring and managing Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) risks (also referred to as sustainability risks). This research report looks at performance of the sector, utilising several sustainability indicators developed by Catalyst Australia in 2013 to rate company reporting and performance. These cover gender equality, environmental impact, labour standards, supply chains, community investment and sustainability engagement. The results of this review are presented visually in the Catalyst Property Sector Sustainability Dashboard and discussed in this report

Gender and Modern Supply Chains in Developing Countries

The rapid spread of modern supply chains in developing countries is profoundly changing the way food is produced and traded. In this paper we examine the gender implications in modern supply chains. We conceptualize the various mechanisms through which women are directly affected, we review existing empirical evidence and add new survey-based evidence. Empirical findings from our own survey suggest that modern supply chains may be associated with reduced gender inequalities in rural areas. We find that women benefit more and more directly from large-scale estate production and agro-industrial processing, and the creation of employment in these modern agro-industries than from smallholder contract-firming

Enhanced pre-frontal functional-structural networks to support postural control deficits after traumatic brain injury in a pediatric population

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) affects the structural connectivity, triggering the re-organization of structural-functional circuits in a manner that remains poorly understood. We focus here on brain networks re-organization in relation to postural control deficits after TBI. We enrolled young participants who had suffered moderate to severeTBI, comparing them to young typically developing control participants. In comparison to control participants, TBI patients (but not controls) recruited prefrontal regions to interact with two separated networks: 1) a subcortical network including part of the motor network, basal ganglia, cerebellum, hippocampus, amygdala, posterior cingulum and precuneus; and 2) a task-positive network, involving regions of the dorsal attention system together with the dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal regions

Computational neurorehabilitation: modeling plasticity and learning to predict recovery

Despite progress in using computational approaches to inform medicine and neuroscience in the last 30 years, there have been few attempts to model the mechanisms underlying sensorimotor rehabilitation. We argue that a fundamental understanding of neurologic recovery, and as a result accurate predictions at the individual level, will be facilitated by developing computational models of the salient neural processes, including plasticity and learning systems of the brain, and integrating them into a context specific to rehabilitation. Here, we therefore discuss Computational Neurorehabilitation, a newly emerging field aimed at modeling plasticity and motor learning to understand and improve movement recovery of individuals with neurologic impairment. We first explain how the emergence of robotics and wearable sensors for rehabilitation is providing data that make development and testing of such models increasingly feasible. We then review key aspects of plasticity and motor learning that such models will incorporate. We proceed by discussing how computational neurorehabilitation models relate to the current benchmark in rehabilitation modeling – regression-based, prognostic modeling. We then critically discuss the first computational neurorehabilitation models, which have primarily focused on modeling rehabilitation of the upper extremity after stroke, and show how even simple models have produced novel ideas for future investigation. Finally, we conclude with key directions for future research, anticipating that soon we will see the emergence of mechanistic models of motor recovery that are informed by clinical imaging results and driven by the actual movement content of rehabilitation therapy as well as wearable sensor-based records of daily activity

Liberalization with Endogenous Institutions: A Comparative Analysis of Agricultural Reform in Africa, Asia, and Europe

Thirty years ago, a vast share of the poor and middle income countries were heavily state-controlled. The effects of the liberalizations in the 1980s and 1990s differed strongly between regions in Africa, Asia and Europe. This paper first documents these differences in refirm effects in a comparative framework and then develops a model to firmally analyze how liberalization affects production and income distribution when institutions that govern production and exchange are also affected. We derive hypotheses on how the endogenous institutional adjustments affect the supply response to the liberalizations. We use these insights to forward a series of explanations on the differences in perfirmance across countries following liberalization