The Role of Agribusiness Firms in Agricultural Research: The Case of China

Despite the efforts of various economists and agricultural scientists in calling for more investments, funding for agricultural R&D has been stagnated for the last two decades in China. This will pose a great challenge for the China's agricultural sector. Productivity has leveled off, and farmers' income has been flat. As a result, poverty reduction in recent years has also not shown any significant progress. On the other hand, agribusiness firms have emerged rapidly since the rural reforms initiated in 1978. Emerging of these firms has fundamentally changed the landscape of Chinese agricultural production. In 2003, they account for a significant share in agricultural GDP (7%), and agricultural employment. More importantly, it is their role in agricultural research and technology adoption that will drastically affect the Chinese agricultural research system, and as a result the structure of the Chinese agricultural economy. In 2003, these firms invested more than 10% equivalence of public spending in agricultural research. If their spending on technology-intensive capital is included, the percentage rose to 30%. Back in the middle of the 1990s, these shares are minimal. It is obvious that these firms will play an even larger role in investing in agricultural research in China. But this increase didn't come automatically. It is the change in the investment environment and government policies that can be attributed to. The objective of the proposed paper is to investigate the structure of these agribusiness firms by sector, location and ownership, and their performance in agricultural research, and to analyze the determinants of growth of these firms and their investment in agricultural research. The data used for the proposed study will be based on a survey conducted by the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2003. The authors provided substantial inputs in the design of questionnaire. More than 500 leading firms (based on their sales) were surveyed. They are located in different parts of China: coastal, central and western. They also represent different sectors, for example, crop production, livestock, feed processing and supply, vegetables/fruits/tree, tea, fishery, seed development/sales and biotechnology/medicine. There firms also vary by their ownership, for example state-, private-, and collective-owned, shareholding, and multinational companies. The proposed study will develop a conceptual framework and to empirically analyze how different factors have affected the performance of these firms. The performance indicators may include profitability, productivity, and more importantly their behavior in investing agricultural R&D. The factors may include their size, ownership (state, private, shareholding, or foreign), location (coastal, central or western), different types of businesses (crop production, livestock, fishery, processing, feed supply, seed breeding and supply, or biotechnology), credit/capital constraint, intellectual property rights regime, tax concession policy, and public investment in agricultural R&D. Many variables are province-specific as many government policies such as those on credit/capital, tax are made at this level of government. These variables will have to be treated carefully as they are potentially endogenous by themselves. Special econometric techniques will be used to minimize the potential bias. In addition, some firm-specific variables such as sectors they involve, ownership, and even locations are self-selected. Again, certain econometric techniques have to be used to test and to minimize the potential selection bias. The expected results will not only have potential contribution to the policy debate on how to mobilize private resources to support to agricultural research in China, but also have strong policy implications for many other developing countries. For the last decade, many developing countries have experienced stagnation or contraction in their public support to agricultural research. How government policies and public investment in agricultural research can build a productive partnership is a very much needed research topic. We hope that our research will shed light on this issue.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

A note on the connection between nonextensive entropy and hh-derivative

In order to study as a whole the major part of entropy measures, we introduce a two-parameter non-extensive entropic form with respect to the \textit{h}-derivative which generalizes the conventional Newton-Leibniz calculus. This new entropy, $S_{h,h'}$, is proved to describe the non-extensive systems and recover several types of the well-known non-extensive entropic expressions, such as the Tsallis entropy, the Abe entropy, the Shafee entropy, the Kaniadakis entropy and even the classical Boltzmann\,--\,Gibbs one. As a generalized entropy, its corresponding properties are also analyzed.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Bayesian quantile regression: An application to the wage distribution in 1990s Britain

This paper illustrates application of Bayesian inference to quantile regression. Bayesian inference regards unknown parameters as random variables, and we describe an MCMC algorithm to estimate the posterior densities of quantile regression parameters. Parameter uncertainty is taken into account without relying on asymptotic approximations. Bayesian inference revealed effective in our application to the wage structure among working males in Britain between 1991 and 2001 using data from the British Household Panel Survey. Looking at different points along the conditional wage distribution uncovered important features of wage returns to education, experience and public sector employment that would be concealed by mean regression.quantile regression ; bayesian inference ; wage distribution ; MCMC

The economics of generating and maintaining plant variety rights in China:

Notwithstanding the ambiguous research and productivity promoting effects of plant variety protections (PVPs), even in developed countries, many developing countries have adopted PVPs in the past few years to comply with their Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) obligations. Seeking and maintaining PVPs reserves options to an expected revenue stream from the future sale of protected varieties, the value of which varies for a host of reasons. In this paper we empirically examine the pattern of plant variety protection applications in China since its PVP laws were first introduced in 1997. We place those PVP rights in the context of China's present and likely future seed markets to identify the economic incentives and institutional aspects that influence decisions to develop and apply for varietal rights.intellectual property, patents, Ownership, Plant propagation, plant breeding, Trade policies, Plant introduction, Crop performance, China,

AN OPTION PERSPECTIVE ON GENERATING AND MAINTAINING PLANT VARIETY RIGHTS IN CHINA

Notwithstanding the ambiguous research and productivity promoting effects of plant variety protections (PVPs), even in developed countries, many developing countries have adopted PVPs in the past few years, in part to comply with their Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) obligations. Seeking and maintaining PVPs reserves options to an expected revenue stream from the future sale of protected varieties, the value of which varies for a host of reasons. In this paper we empirically examine the pattern of plant variety protection applications in China since its PVP laws were first introduced in 1997. We place those PVP rights in the context of China's present and likely future seed markets to identify the economic incentives and institutional influences on decisions to develop and apply for varietal rights.intellectual property rights, crop improvement, option value, seed markets, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The Ecological Effects of Ant-Aphid Mutualism on Plants at a Large Spatial Scale

The protective ant-plant interaction has been considered as a model system in studying mutualistic interactions, but we know little about the ecological effects of the mutualism at relatively larger spatial scales. In this study, by excluding an aphid-tending ant species (Lasius fuliginosus) from all host oak trees (Quercus liaotungensis) in 20x20 m plots, we evaluated the effects of ants on herbivory, fruit production and leaf toughness of the host tree. Through a two years study, we found that ants have a significant anti-herbivory effect on the host tree, with no effects on fruit production. At the end of the growing season, leaf toughness for plants without ants increased significantly. This suggests that ants are reliable and effective bodyguards for plants at larger spatial scales. For plants, the possible tradeoff between different defensive strategies at larger scale should be focused in further works

Integrating component-based scientific computing software

Book ChapterIn recent years, component technology has been a successful methodology for large-scale commercial software development. Component technology combines a set of frequently used functions in a component and makes the implementation transparent to users. Software application developers typically connect a group of components from a component repository, connecting them to create a single application

A novel fuzzy logic algorithm for accurate fall detection of smart wristband

Falling is a major cause of serious injury or even death for the elderly population. To improve the safety of elderly people, a wide range of wearable fall detection devices have been developed over recent years, such as smart watches, waistbands and other wearable fall detectors. However, most of these fall detection devices are threshold-based and have a high rate of false alarm. This paper presents a novel fuzzy logic fall detection algorithm used in smart wristbands to reduce false alarms and achieve accurate fall detection. Experiments have been conducted in our laboratory and the results show that the proposed algorithm can accurately distinguish fall events from non-fall daily activities such as walking, jumping, clapping, and so forth. It shows good potential for commercial applications

A Ubiquitous Unifying Degeneracy in Two-Body Microlensing Systems

While gravitational microlensing by planetary systems provides unique vistas on the properties of exoplanets, observations of a given 2-body microlensing event can often be interpreted with multiple distinct physical configurations. Such ambiguities are typically attributed to the close-wide and inner-outer types of degeneracies that arise from transformation invariances and symmetries of microlensing caustics. However, there remain unexplained inconsistencies between aforementioned theories and observations. Here, leveraging a fast machine learning inference framework, we present the discovery of the offset degeneracy, which concerns a magnification-matching behaviour on the lens-axis and is formulated independent of caustics. This offset degeneracy unifies the close-wide and inner-outer degeneracies, generalises to resonant topologies, and upon reanalysis, not only appears ubiquitous in previously published planetary events with 2-fold degenerate solutions, but also resolves prior inconsistencies. Our analysis demonstrates that degenerate caustics do not strictly result in degenerate magnifications and that the commonly invoked close-wide degeneracy essentially never arises in actual events. Moreover, it is shown that parameters in offset degenerate configurations are related by a simple expression. This suggests the existence of a deeper symmetry in the equations governing 2-body lenses than previously recognised.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, submitte