The Potential for Joint Farming Ventures in Irish Agriculture: A Sociological Review

peer-reviewedJoint farming ventures (JFVs) are promoted within Irish and EU policy discourses as strategies that can enhance the economic and social sustainability of family farming. Research has shown that JFVs, including arrangements such as farm partnerships, contract rearing and share farming, can potentially enable farmers to work cooperatively to improve farm productivity, reduce working hours, facilitate succession, develop skills and improve relationships within the farm household. In the context of increasing policy promotion of JFVs, there is a need to make some attempt at understanding the macro socio-cultural disposition of family farming to cooperation. Reviewing sociological studies of agricultural cooperation and taking a specific focus on the Irish contextual backdrop, this paper draws the reader’s attention to the importance of historical legacy, pragmatic economic and social concerns, communicative norms, inter-personal relationships, individualism and, policy and extension stimuli, all of which shape farmers’ dispositions to cooperation and to JFVs specifically.This work was funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Ireland under the Research Stimulus Fund (RSF), Project Number: 11/S/151

Global SPACING Constraint (Technical Report)

We propose a new global SPACING constraint that is useful in modeling events that are distributed over time, like learning units scheduled over a study program or repeated patterns in music compositions. First, we investigate theoretical properties of the constraint and identify tractable special cases. We propose efficient DC filtering algorithms for these cases. Then, we experimentally evaluate performance of the proposed algorithms on a music composition problem and demonstrate that our filtering algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art approach for solving this problem

ESTIMATING PRODUCTIVITY DYNAMICS DURING INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: AN APPLICATION TO CHINESE STATE OWNED ENTERPRISES 1980-1994

We estimate the productivity dynamics of 680 industrial Chinese State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) between 1980 and 1994. During this time managerial autonomy over factor markets was introduced. The timing of autonomy varied across SOEs and take-up was an endogenous process: high-productivity SOEs where more likely to take managerial control. We allow for this by adapting an algorithm developed in Olley & Pakes (1996) in order to generate estimates of productivity dynamics that deal with both simultaneity and endogenous selection biases. Apart from offering a methodology to estimate productivity dynamics during endogenous institutional change, we demonstrate that SOEs in China obtained productivity gains from managerial autonomy over factor markets in the years before privatisation.

Successful Factor Market Competition Pre-Privatisation? China`s eclectic.com

Can factor market competition, given pertinent incentives, bring about efficiency gains, or is privatisation necessary? We assess the impact of factor market competition on Chinese state-owned enterprises' productivity in a laboratory-like setting. The empirical evidence suggests that substantial efficiency gains are achievable pre-privatisation. Methodologically, we adapt an algorithm developed by Olley and Pakes (1996) which deals with simultaneity and selection bias in production function estimation. This is required since the reform process that introduced factor market competition involved endogenous group selection. While macro-level timing was important, enterprise characteristics, chiefly capital intensity and productivity, played an important role in the sequencing of reforms. Further, reform-induced competitive pressures brought about significant efficiency gains prior to privatisation. Finally, not controlling for selection bias would have resulted in an overestimation of reform-related productivity gains by up to fifty percent.

Reforms and Productivity Dynamics in Chinese State-Owned Enterprises

Institutional change has taken place incrementally since 1978 for State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the Industrial Sector of China. We will provide evidence for the notion that this is largely due to increased domestic competitive pressures and the opportunities arising from the integration of international markets. In this paper we estimate the effect of deep reform (the right to hire and fire labour, buy and sell capital and operate on international markets) on the productivity dynamics of entreprises. Using a unique balanced panel of681 SOEs for the period 1980 to 1994, we find consistent production function estimatesusing an algorithm put forward in Olley and Pakes (1996), which estimates using an simultaneity bias. Futhermore, we allow selection bias by formulating an entry that exposure to deep reform hav lead to higher productivity realisations while remaining under state ownership.

Financial intermediation, monetary policy, and equilibrium business cycles

Business cycles ; Monetary theory ; Financial institutions

Ethnography, education and on-line research

This paper is an attempt to establish the methodological basis for carrying out ethnographies of online education communities, in particular in the Continuing Professional Development VITAL project co-ordinated by the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at The Open University www.vital.ac.uk/ A much shorter earlier draft version of this paper was given at the Qualitative Research For Web 2.0/3.0: The Next Leap! 25 & 26 March 2010 in Berlin. Organised by Merlien. The arguments and references in this paper are almost all to be found in two books 'one authored and one edited – by Professor Christine Hine of Surrey University, UK (Hine 2000; Hine 2005)