THE POLITICS OF UNDERINVESTMENT IN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH

This paper develops a political economy framework that determines the factors causing underinvestment in public research expenditures. Governments are unable to fully compensate for unequal income distribution effects of research because of either their inability to make credible commitments or of deadweight costs associated with compensation.Political Economy, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

CAN PRICE SUPPORTS NEGATE THE SOCIAL GAINS FROM PUBLIC RESEARCH EXPENDITURES IN AGRICULTURE?

The burgeoning literature on how the benefits from research may be negative for a given price support arbitrarily ignores the costs of price supports for a given level of research. Furthermore, the very existence of price supports is inconsistent with the normative criterion that governments simply maximize social income. We show that there are always gains from research, even if governments maximize social income subject to a farm income goal. Our results are also consistent with the statements made by Schultz and Ruttan that ignoring price supports will result in all over (or under) valuation of research benefits. Finally, we indicate that the predictions of the "no gains from research" literature may not be substantiated by empirical evidence and that the ideal normative model should include endogenous farm income levels as well.Demand and Price Analysis, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Are You Still There? - A Lightweight Algorithm to Monitor Node Presence in Self-Configuring Networks

This paper is concerned with the analysis and redesign of a distributed algorithm to monitor the availability of nodes in self-configuring networks. The simple scheme to regularly probe a node ¿ "are you still there?" ¿ may easily lead to over- or underloading. The essence of the algorithm is therefore to automatically adapt the probing frequency. We show that a self-adaptive scheme to control the probe load, originally proposed as an extension to the UPnPTM (Universal Plug and Play) standard, leads to an unfair treatment of nodes: some nodes probe fast while others almost starve. An alternative distributed algorithm is proposed that overcomes this problem and that tolerates highly dynamic network topology changes. The algorithm is very simple and can be implemented on large networks of small computing devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, and so on

THE POLITICS OF UNDERINVESTMENT IN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH

WP 1996-01 February 1996This paper develops a political economy framework that determines the factors causing underinvestment in public research expenditures. Governments are unable to fully compensate for unequal income distribution effects of research because of either their inability to make credible commitments or of deadweight costs associated with compensation