Distribución de Alimentos e Intervención en la Nutrición: El Caso de Chile

The paper analyzes the impact of Chile's Complementary Feeding Program (CFP), both on the direct and indirect beneficiaries. The paper describes Chile's major nutrition intervention programs and establishes the relative importance of the CFP in terms of b

Policy recommendations from the 13th ICABR conference on the emerging bioeconomy

The International Consortium on Agricultural Biotechnology Research held its 13th annual conference in Ravello, Italy in June 2009. The theme of the conference was the bioeconomy,and this topic was addressed through research presentations from academia, government, and industry. Numerous presentations from developing countries highlighted the benefits of agricultural biotechnology in these nations. The broad range of presentations provided a wealth of insights, resulting in three policy recommendations regarding future funding, international regulation, and technology transfer.global food crisis, biofuels, food safety, innovation

Policy recommendations from the 13th ICABR conference on the emerging bioeconomy

The International Consortium on Agricultural Biotechnology Research held its 13th annual conference in Ravello, Italy in June 2009. The theme of the conference was the bioeconomy,and this topic was addressed through research presentations from academia, government, and industry. Numerous presentations from developing countries highlighted the benefits of agricultural biotechnology in these nations. The broad range of presentations provided a wealth of insights, resulting in three policy recommendations regarding future funding, international regulation, and technology transfer

The Adoption and Diffusion of GM Crops in United States : A Real Option Approach

The article aims at modelling adoption and diffusion decisions of farmers towards genetically modified crops under a real option framework. Modern GM crops help farmers to resolve two main sources of uncertainty: output uncertainty and input uncertainty. Those crops represent a revolutionary form of farming compared to the technology adoption studied in the literature in the late '70s and early '80s. The article develops a theoretical model of adoption and diffusion of new GM crops under uncertainty and irreversibility. We test our theoretical predictions using data from 2000 to 2008 of a panel dataset constructed for 13 US states involved in the production of four different GM crops. These conclusions may appear to contradict the general perception of a delayed penetration for the GM crops, whose success seems to be retarded by lack of information, mistrust, and an exaggerated perception of risks. GM crops tend to be invasive, in that their short-term profitability is so high as compared with the investment needed, that once the hump of uncertainty is overcome, they operate a veritable takeover of agriculture

Producers' price expectations and the size of the welfare gains from price stabilisation.

PRIFPRI3p. 93-107 : tables ; 23 cm

price forecasting and the need for intervention policies

Non-PRIFPRI5xii, 142 p. ; 23 cm

Organized crime, extortion and entrepreneurship under uncertainty

This article investigates the impact of organized crime (OC) on economic activity in conditions of dynamic uncertainty. It shows that the hypothesis of rationality does not imply a one to one correspondence between illegal behavior and expected benefits and costs of the criminal action, since two different regimes may ensue from the threat of racketeering. These two regimes will be respectively characterized by acquiescence and no private protection activities, and by optimal private protection that will push OC into a zone of inaction. The latter outcome will correspond to a Stackelberg equilibrium of a preventive type in the sense that the action of the firm as a leader will confine OC in a zone of temporary inaction. Since the extent to which private protection will succeed in deterring the criminal is lower the higher is uncertainty, and the higher are public protection activities, switching from one regime to the other may thus be determined even by small changes in uncertainty or public protection. If public protection is below a critical level, the threat of extortion also creates incentives for the firm to enter an agreement with the criminal, by negotiating an acceptable rate of extortion. At the same time, however, higher public protection will favor a better deal for the victim in such a negotiation

Innovation and imitation as an interactive process

This article deals with the problem of the coexistence of innovators and imitators in a competitive market. The study proposes a model of innovation and diffusion of productive knowledge as an interactive process between innovators and imitators under conditions of dynamic uncertainty. The process can be modelled as a Stackelberg game, where the innovator acts as a leader in choosing whether to share knowledge or set up private protection and the imitator as a follower in choosing when becoming active. Under these conditions, activation thresholds are derived for both innovators and imitators. If protection policies are effective, the imitator can be trapped into an inaction region by the innovator. Thus, there will be two regimes without and with diffusion, according to whether the inaction region is enacted or not. Under these conditions, discovery and diffusion appear to be dynamic complements, as a higher speed of activation of innovating firms is favoured by a higher level of imitation and a higher speed of activation of imitating firms is favoured by a higher level of discoveries. In order to explore some of the quantitative implications of these results, the paper also proposes an application of the model to four European countries

Un approccio analitico al project financing con la teoria delle opzioni reali

This article presents a model that treats project financing as a stylised situation that is validated by its economic and financial characteristics. Making use of the theoretical apparatus of irreversible investments during conditions of uncertainty, which provides a clear snapshot of the risk inherent in project financing operations, it answers a series of critical questions for the realisation of large public works, such as: the duration of a concession, the price agreed upon by the parties and the most economic type of contract. The presented model allows for the calculation of the minimum and maximum values of the concession price and both public and private economic expediency. It is applicable in a large variety of project financing cases, which differ from the use of public resource

Stima della DAP e del valore delle risorse del Golfo di Castellammare

Ee use the Contingent Evaluation methodology to develop an economic evaluation of natural resources in a protected marine area of Sicily. Assuming a nonnormal distribution for the ML estimation, we show that a variant of the stochastic utility model appears to capture well the dependence of the willingness to pay (WTP) on the socioeconomic characteristics of a sample of stakeholders of the natural resources in question. The estimates obtained are consistent and robust across different policy measures, no embedding or sequencing effects emerge and option values also appear to have been elicited in a consistent way. Once these values are added to the basic WTP, the income elasticities estimated fall in the range reported by other studie