The Role of Income Growth in Emerging Markets and the BRICs in Agrifood Trade

This study develops an import demand model to explore the role of income in explaining the trade performance of low, middle and high-income countries with a special emphasis on Brazil, Russia, India and China – the BRIC economies. The study estimates the impact of the growth in per capita income on the trade of agrifood products using data for 52 countries and 20 agrifood products for the years 1990 to 2006. The results suggest that China, Russia and Brazil have more income elastic import demand than other middle-income countries. Conversely, the income elasticities of import demand in India are similar to other low-income countries and for the most part statistically equal to zero.Emerging economies, BRIC economies, Food trade, Income elasticities, Economic growth, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Development, International Relations/Trade,

Differentiated Agri-Food Product Trade and the Linder Effect

Using a generalized gravity equation, this study tests for the Linder effect in differentiated agrifood product trade, i.e. as the demand structures of two countries become more similar, their trade intensity increases. Two proxies of demand structure, the Balassa index and the absolute value of the difference in per capita GDPs of trading partners, are used to capture the Linder effect. In addition, two measures of bilateral trade, the Grubel and Lloyed index, and the value of bilateral trade are used as the dependent variable. The study investigates the role of the Linder effect in explaining the trade of 37 differentiated agri-food and beverage products categorized into eight product groups: cereals; fresh fish; frozen fish; vegetables; fresh fruit; processed fruit; tea and coffee; and alcoholic beverages. The data covers trade across 52 developed and developing countries from 1990 to 2000. The type of proxy used for the Linder effect and the way in which bilateral trade is measured influence the outcome of the statistical tests for the Linder effect. The Linder effect for cereals, frozen fish, vegetables, processed fruits, and tea and coffee, using the value of trade as the dependent variable, is often accepted but it is generally rejected when the GL index is used as the measure of trade intensity. In brief, the results do not provide strong support for the Linder effect in the trade of differentiated agri-food products.Agri-food, Generalized Gravity Equation, Grubel and Lloyed index, Linder Effect, trade, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade,

Integrated Use of Farm Yard Manure and Urea Fertilizer Enhanced Tissue Nitrogen of Wheat at Different Growth Stages

Efficient nitrogen (N) use is one of the most critical issues for crop management. Field trials were carried out in 2009-10 growing years to investigate response of seven Farmyard Manure (FYM) doses and three N rates (0, 45 and 90 kgha-1) for agronomical traits in wheat. In the research the traits such as at boot, anthesis (leaf, stem), and maturity (leaf, stem, grain and straw) nitrogen content were investigated. Plant tissue analysis is very helpful to detect plant nutritional problems or to observe the usefulness of a soil fertility program. It is a chemical estimation of nutritional condition and concentrations of important elements found in for nutritional condition of plants. Proper understanding of plant tissue analysis results is critical to effective use of this management device. The objectives of this study were to clarify the N condition of different layers at different growth stages and at various N treatments and provide new data on wheat quality factors in combination with N of different canopy layers potentially effect wheat quality during growth. It was demonstrated from the experimental results that the uses of FYM with urea before and at sowing have the potential to enhance the tissue nitrogen content of wheat. Keywords: Wheat, F YM, Urea, Tissue nitroge

What impact has food price inflation had on consumer welfare: a global analysis

The impact of rising global food prices on consumer welfare is investigated. A quadratic AIDS model is estimated using data spanning countries at various levels of economic development. Statistical comparison suggests the QUAIDS model is preferred over the non-linear AIDS model. Estimated parameters are used to calibrate a QUAIDS indirect utility function and base utility for welfare analysis. Compensated variation associated with recently observed food price inflation for different foods in different income cohorts of countries is calculated. Per capita compensated variation increases with per capita expenditure. However, per capita compensated variation expressed as a percent of per capita expenditure falls as one moves from less developed to more developed countries. Aggregate compensating variation associated with annualized food price inflation between 2005 and 2008 is estimated at US$515 billion globallyConsumer/Household Economics,

The Role of Income and Non-homothetic Preferences in Trading Differentiated Food and Beverages. The Case of Canada, the United States, and Selected EU Countries

This study investigates the role of income in determining the agrifood exports of selected EU countries, Canada, and the United States (U.S.) by estimating per capita bilateral trade flows for 10 commodity groups across 52 countries for the period 1990–2000. About 43 percent of the total observations of bilateral trade-flows for the selected regions and commodities are zero. Therefore, the fixed-effects Heckman two-step estimation procedure is used to account for the zero observations instead of ignoring or truncating the zeros. A number of hypotheses are tested to highlight the role of income in determining agrifood exports of differentiated agrifood products. The results show that the three regions (selected EU countries, Canada, United States) face statistically significant, positive and relatively elastic expenditure elasticities from the developing countries as compared to developed countries. Middle income developing countries, among developing countries, are the growth market of the future as growth in their expenditure on agrifood imports outpaces growth in their per capita income. However, all U.S. agrifood exports face statistically significant expenditure elasticities as compared to only a few for Canadian and EU commodities. The study also finds that Canadian exports face homothetic preferences, U.S. exports face homothetic preferences for more than one-half of the commodities, and the selected EU countries’ exports face non-homothetic preferences for nine commodity groups. The study concludes that income plays an important role in agrifood trade; however, further investigation is needed to help us understand the forces that determine the divergent results.International Relations/Trade,

Energy-aware peering routing protocol for indoor hospital body area network communication

The recent research in Body Area Networks (BAN) is focused on making its communication more reliable, energy efficient, secure, and to better utilize system resources. In this paper we propose a novel BAN network architecture for indoor hospital environments, and a new mechanism of peer discovery with routing table construction that helps to reduce network traffic load, energy consumption, and improves BAN reliability. We have performed extensive simulations in the Castalia simulation environment to show that our proposed protocol has better performance in terms of reduced BAN traffic load, increased number of successful packets received by nodes, reduced number of packets forwarded by intermediate nodes, and overall lower energy consumption compared to other protocols

Micro-econometric Analysis of Impact of Remittances on Household’s Welfare: Empirical Evidence from District Peshawar

The present study has been conducted in the year 2010 in district Peshawar to assess the impact of inflow of remittances on household’s welfare. The concept welfare was measured in terms of consumption expenditures of the household. A sample of 60 household was interviewed using snowball sampling combined with the convenient sampling technique. A regression model which was a mixture of direct elasticity and semi-elasticity was used to quantify the relationships. Apart from inflow of remittances (lnremt), three control variables (i.e. years of schooling of the household’s head – edu, age of household’s head – age & family size – fz) were employed to standardize the impact. Controlling for edu, age & edu, this paper conclude that inflow of remittances enhance household’s welfare. All control variables have theoretically correct positive signs. These results were statistically significant and results showed no major econometric problems that can influence statistical inference derived from the model. So it is highly recommended, in light of the present study, that govt. of Pakistan should take all possible steps to export labors abroad. It has dual positive impacts, one enhancing household’s prosperity (welfare) and other reducing unemployment at local level.