A Total Factor Productivity Index for Scottish Agriculture 1973-2004

Thirtle et al (2003) have provided a Total Factor Productivity (TFP) index for UK agriculture. This note follows a similar methodology to construct a TFP index for Scottish agriculture beginning in 1973 and ending in 2004. Essentially, Scottish agricultural growth grew strongly during the 1970s but then fell to negative levels over the period 1984-2004. In comparison to the UK Index, Scotland has performed poorly and is only showing signs of a positive recovery from 2000 onwards.Productivity Analysis,

Technical Efficiency Estimates of Scottish Agriculture: Evidence from the dairy, sheep and cereals sector

Technical efficiency, the ratio of physical inputs to outputs, is a popular means of assessing agricultural performance. Benchmarking of these efficiencies is a fundamental tool for the farming industry. More sophisticated techniques have been developed recently which offer a greater degree of complexity for measuring technical efficiency. This paper adopts a parametric approach, referred to as stochastic production frontiers (SPF), to study three major sectors the Scottish agricultural economy, namely i) cereals, ii) dairy, and iii) sheep, over the period 1989 to 2004.Crop Production/Industries, Livestock Production/Industries, Productivity Analysis,

The construction and evaluation of seven lessons correlating music in grades three and six.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

A Total Social Factor Productivity Index for the UK Food Chain Post-Farm Gate

The UK post-farm gate food chain comprises manufacturing, wholesaling , retailing and catering. Current turnover is around £250 billion per annum. Total factor productivity measures the ratio of inputs to outputs. However, most studies have only included the marketable inputs and outputs within the system. Following criticisms of the negative effects of the food chain this paper adopts a n index based approach to measuring Total Social Factor Productivity, which includes the major externalities within the food chain. Generally, whilst TFP growth rates are low over the period 1998-2002, these have reduced even further when negative externalities are included.Food Chain, Total Factor Productivity, Total Social Factor Productivity, Externalities, Industrial Organization, Productivity Analysis, Q56,

Measuring the Sustainability of the UK Food Chain

Recent policy interest has been directed at the sustainability of food industries, in particular the post-farm gate food chain. This comprises of manufacturing, wholesaling, retailing and catering. In order to measure sustainability Byerlee and Murgai (2001) have argued that productivity measures, alongside key indicators of resource quality trends, should be used to indicate sustainable growth. This paper adopts this approach by presenting Fisher indexes of both Total Factor Productivity (TFP) index and for prominent externalities emerging from the food chain over the period 1998 to 2002. TFP shows an average annual growth rate of –0.52% per annum. Input growth, in particular intermediate purchases, has outstripped output growth over the entirety of this period. In addition, major externalities of environmental and social costs have increased over this period. Consequently, both sets of indicators give a somewhat bleak assessment of the sustainability of the UK food chain.Total Factor Productivity, Externalities, Sustainable Growth, Agribusiness,

Tobacco Use and Health Insurance Literacy Among Vulnerable Populations: Implications for Health Reform

Background: Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), millions of Americans have been enrolling in the health insurance marketplaces. Nearly 20% of them are tobacco users. As part of the ACA, tobacco users may face up to 50% higher premiums that are not eligible for tax credits. Tobacco users, along with the uninsured and racial/ethnic minorities targeted by ACA coverage expansions, are among those most likely to suffer from low health literacy – a key ingredient in the ability to understand, compare, choose, and use coverage, referred to as health insurance literacy. Whether tobacco users choose enough coverage in the marketplaces given their expected health care needs and are able to access health care services effectively is fundamentally related to understanding health insurance. However, no studies to date have examined this important relationship.Methods: Data were collected from 631 lower-income, minority, rural residents of Virginia. Health insurance literacy was assessed by asking four factual questions about the coverage options presented to them. Adjusted associations between tobacco use and health insurance literacy were tested using multivariate linear regression, controlling for numeracy, risk-taking, discount rates, health status, experiences with the health care system, and demographics.Results: Nearly one third (31%) of participants were current tobacco users, 80% were African American and 27% were uninsured. Average health insurance literacy across all participants was 2.0 (SD 1.1) out of a total possible score of 4. Current tobacco users had significantly lower HIL compared to non-users (−0.22, p \u3c 0.05) after adjustment. Participants who were less educated, African American, and less numerate reported more difficulty understanding health insurance (p \u3c 0.05 each.)Conclusions: Tobacco users face higher premiums for health coverage than non-users in the individual insurance marketplace. Our results suggest they may be less equipped to shop for plans that provide them with adequate out-of-pocket risk protection, thus placing greater financial burdens on them and potentially limiting access to tobacco cessation and treatment programs and other needed health services

A Metafrontier Analysis of Technical Efficiency of Selected European Agricultures

Farm Management,

A Metafrontier Analysis of Technical Efficiency of Selected European Agricultures

Technical efficiency refers to the situation where it is impossible for a firm to produce, with the given know-how, (1) a larger output from the same inputs or (2) the same output with less of one or more inputs without increasing the amount of other inputs. In practice, the interest is on the relative position in terms of efficiency of a particular firm with respect to others. Therefore, technical efficiency is characterised by the relationship between observed production and some ideal or potential production (Greene, 1993). Although the beginning of the efficiency work can be traced to the 1950s (Farrell, 1957), there have been a growing interest on its use in benchmarking performance, predominantly as a means of identifying best practice and improving the efficiency of resource use within the agricultural industry (e.g., Defra 2004, SAC 2009). This paper deals with the estimation of technical efficiency for the agricultural sectors in several European countries and moreover, it aims to compare the efficiency amongst them using a metafrontier analysis. The use of this type of analysis is justified because a frontier, which represents the best available technology within a particular region/country cannot be strictly compared across other regions/countries, unless they operate under the same production set. The metafrontier analysis has been developed in a number of studies (Battese and Rao, 2002; Nkamleu et al., 2006; Chen and Song, 2006; O‟Donnell et al., 2008.) The metafrontier analysis in this paper, which uses data from the Farm Accountancy data Network (FADN), was focused on four farm types: two specialised farming types (i.e., specialist cereals, oilseed and protein crops and specialist dairying) and two more mixed farming sets (i.e., general field cropping and mixed farms), and was applied to a total of 11 countries namely Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. For most of the countries the information was available from 1995 until 2007, excepting Hungary and Poland, for which it was available only since 2004. Also note that not all the farm types were available for all the countries. The structure of the paper is as follows: it starts presenting an overview of the metafrontier analysis used to compare technical efficiency amongst the European countries. It is followed by the empirical work, which comprises a description of the data used, the estimation and discussion of the results. Finally we present conclusions.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Reduced-Complexity Maximum-Likelihood Detection in Downlink SDMA Systems

The literature of up-link SDMA systems is rich, but at the time of writing there is a paucity of information on the employment of SDMA techniques in the down-link. Hence, in this paper a Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) down-link (DL) multi-user communication system invoking a novel low-complexity Maximum Likelihood (ML) space-time detection technique is proposed, which can be regarded as an advanced extension of the Complex Sphere Decoder (CSD). We demonstrate that as opposed to the previously published variants of the CSD, the proposed technique may be employed for obtaining a high effective throughput in the so-called “over-loaded” scenario, where the number of transmit antennas exceeds that of the receive antennas. The proposed method achieves the optimum performance of the ML detector even in heavily over-loaded scenarios, while the associated computational complexity is only moderately increased. As an illustrative example, the required Eb/N0 increased from 2 dB to 9 dB, when increasing the normalized system load from unity, representing the fully loaded system, to a normalized load of 1.556