An Economic Analysis of the Production Behaviour of Fishing Firms in Selected Fisheries of Malaysia.

An import an t problem in the fishing industry of Peninsular Malaysia is the existence of grouprivalry and conflict between art is anal fishermen and trawlers resulting from the common property nature of fishery. This has led to overfishing in the inshore waters affecting both the catch and income of a large majority of artisanal fishermen. The present system of distributing marine earnings which favours boat owners further aggravates the problem of poverty among fishermen. This study examines the distribution of marine earnings, costs and returns of the fishing operations for three gears namely, trawl, purse seine and gill net, and the structure of their respective harvesting technologies. The general objective is to study the production behaviour of the relevant fishing firms and the specific objectives include the study of supply response to changes in fish prices, input demand response to changes in fact or prices, and cross supply and demand responses to changes in output-input prices. The nature of the share systems in marine fishing and the extent of their variations across boats and locations is also examined. The study also attempts to determine whether the observed vessel sizes are in long-run equilibrium

A Multistage Budgeting Approach to the Analysis of Demand for Fish: An Application to Inland Areas of Bangladesh

This study was conducted to estimate the elasticities of demand for eight different fish types and four income groups in Bangladesh using year-round data collected from inland areas of the country. It uses a three-stage budgeting framework that estimates a demand function for food in the first stage, a demand function for fish (as a group) in the second stage, and a set of demand functions for fish by type in the third stage using a quadratic extension of the Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS) model. The Heckman procedure was used in stage three to remove the possible bias in the parameter estimates brought about by zero consumption. The magnitude of both price and income elasticities varies across different fish types and income quartile groups, indicating the relevance of estimation specific to fish types and quartiles. Except for assorted small fish, the other seven fish types included in the study were found to have positive income elasticity for all income levels. Assorted small fish is an inferior commodity for the richest quartile of the population.Bangladesh, fish demand elasticities, Inverse Mills Ratio, multi-stage budgeting, quadratic extension to Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS), Demand and Price Analysis, International Development, Public Economics, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, C3, Q21,

Institutional credit for agriculture in Bangladesh

The study relates to an analysis of the short- term production loans obtained by the borrowers of the Janata Bank (a Nationalised Commercial Bank), Co-operative (financed by Central Co-operative Bank), Integrated Rural Development Program, IRDP (financed by Sonali Bank, a Nationalised Commercial Bank) and the Bangladesh Krishi Bank, BKB (Agriculture Bank) under the normal credit program in Bangladesh. The study aimed at evaluating lending policies, examining borrower characteristics, finding out the factors influencing the supply of credit and measuring the magnitude of non-interest costs in loan transactions from the formal sources. The characteristics of the borrowers were well reflected by the lending policies of the respective credit institutions. Borrower characteristics between the Integrated Rural Development Program and the Co-operative were found to be similar in 75 per cent of the attributes tested. This was significantly different to the borrowers of the Bangladesh Krishi Bank. The Integrated Rural Development Program and the Co-operative were found to be the institutions oriented towards smaller farmers while the Bangladesh Krishi Bank was for larger farmers. The Janata Bank accommodated most of the borrowers of medium farm Sizes. The study identified four factors namely, stated demand (self assessed requirement) for credit, the land, financial endowment and education influencing the supply of formal credit. Stated demand for credit and the land appeared as the most important significant factors determining supply of credit. Education, on the pooled observation, was found to have significant positive effect on credit supply. The negative sign in the variable Financial Endowment for the Integrated Rural Development Program and the Co- operative reflects the fact that borrowers with a higher financial endowment were disbursed a lower amount of credit. This is in line with their lending policies. This model of regression explained 58 per cent of the variation In the institutional credit supply. A substantial portion of the credit needs of the borrowers remains unsatisfied. Non- interest costs, it appeared from the study, are not only substantial but have all the characteristics of fixed costs. They decreased rapidly as loan sizes went up. Non-interest transaction costs were found to be 5.04 per cent, 8.05 per cent, 6.54 per cent and 10.59 per cent respectively for the borrowers of the Janata Bank, the Co-operative, the Integrated Rural Development Program and the Bangladesh Krishi Bank. The effective rate of interest on formal loans thus becomes much higher than the mere formal official rate of interest. The overwhelming majority (i.e., smaller) of the borrowers had to face the higher regions of the average cost curves

An advantage based policy transfer algorithm for reinforcement learning with metrics of transferability

Reinforcement learning (RL) can enable sequential decision-making in complex and high-dimensional environments if the acquisition of a new state-action pair is efficient, i.e., when interaction with the environment is inexpensive. However, there are a myriad of real-world applications in which a high number of interactions are infeasible. In these environments, transfer RL algorithms, which can be used for the transfer of knowledge from one or multiple source environments to a target environment, have been shown to increase learning speed and improve initial and asymptotic performance. However, most existing transfer RL algorithms are on-policy and sample inefficient, and often require heuristic choices in algorithm design. This paper proposes an off-policy Advantage-based Policy Transfer algorithm, APT-RL, for fixed domain environments. Its novelty is in using the popular notion of ``advantage'' as a regularizer, to weigh the knowledge that should be transferred from the source, relative to new knowledge learned in the target, removing the need for heuristic choices. Further, we propose a new transfer performance metric to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and unify existing transfer RL frameworks. Finally, we present a scalable, theoretically-backed task similarity measurement algorithm to illustrate the alignments between our proposed transferability metric and similarities between source and target environments. Numerical experiments on three continuous control benchmark tasks demonstrate that APT-RL outperforms existing transfer RL algorithms on most tasks, and is $10\%$ to $75\%$ more sample efficient than learning from scratch

Use of a New Transportation Algorithm for Profit Maximization

A transportation calculation is advanced, and it makes it possible to be able to effectively plan the assets with the end goal of augmenting the benefit of an assembling organization. The distribution indicators (DI) have been resolved from the distinction of the bigger unit profit and the average value of total unit profit of each row and column. Also, the area of the fundamental cells has been resolved as the biggest entrance of the transportation table (TT) along the biggest DI. The most extreme benefit given by this calculation is closer to the other benefit. The strategy, however, is represented with numerical examples to legitimize its proficiency

Social and Islamic entrepreneurships for social justice: A structural framework for social enterprise economics

Entrepreneurship is indispensable for progress of human civilization and effectively exploring and exploiting existing and potential resources for wellbeing of humanity.Modern economics operates basically through two major modes of entrepreneurships : the market/private sector economics relying on commercial entrepreneurships (self-interest centric) and the state/public sector economics relying on state entrepreneurships (public-well-being centric). However, both individually and jointly, have failed to ensure economics fundamental goal of well-being for human societies.In response, social enterprise economics (third sector), which features cooperatives and not-for-profit social enterprises in the name of foundations, trusts/awqāf, social businesses, and similar undertakings, has emerged as a make-up strategy to meet the minimum unmet requirements for social well-being.However, there is a strongly felt belief that the social enterprise economics needs to be broadened and mainstreamed in order to include entirely charitable institutions, predominantly not-for-profit operations, and predominantly for-profit businesses but blended with social justice via provision of social welfare programs like corporate social responsibility, etc., for its emancipation as a major economic system to be able to play a leading role for ensuring desirable economic growth and development.Islamic entrepreneurship, which is basically a community-centric mode of business initiative, is closely related to social entrepreneurship. It is an antidote to the problem of intolerable economic and social dualism and a natural strategy against all forms of capitalist exploitation to control world resources, like, in the past, through European colonialism, and now, through American-led state terrorism. It is the natural guard against economic inequity, wealth concentration, and social divides.Based on its potential and using examples from Bangladesh and Malaysia, we contend that the Islamic style social entrepreneurship is intellectually and operationally superior and more efficient for effectively widening and mainstreaming community-centric social enterprise economics to ensure development with equity and social justice. The paper aims to put forward social enterprise economics (third sector) for dialogue and research in the context of effective functioning of modern economies ensuring community well-being

Assessment of genetic variation in selected germplasm of white jute (Corchorus capsularis L.)

Fifty-one genotypes of white jute from different geographic origins were evaluated to study their genetic variability with 11 morphological characters. Significant variation was observed among the genotypes for all the characters. Multivariate techniques were used to classify 51 genotypes. All the genotypes were grouped into six different clusters. Principal component analysis, principal coordinate analysis and canonical vector analysis gave similar results to that of cluster analysis. The highest inter-genotypic distance (1.84) was found between G15, G50 and the lowest distance between G38 and G26. The highest inter-cluster distance (14.37) was observed between cluster I, IV and the lowest distance (2.46) was between cluster III and V. The highest intra-cluster distance was found in cluster I and lowest in cluster V. Considering genetic parameters, high genotypic coefficient of variation (GCV) was observed in branches per plant. High heritability values with moderate genetic advance in percentage of mean were obtained for leaf width, petiole length, nodes per plant. Regarding the cluster distance, inter-genotypic distance and other agronomic performance, the genotypes G47, G33, G48 from cluster I; G27, G17, G23 from cluster III and G13, G40, G45 from cluster II were considered to be better parents for future use in hybridisation programmes

Assessing efficiency of private shrimp seed producers in selected hatcheries of Peninsular Malaysia

This study aims at estimating technical, allocative and cost efficiency of shrimp/prawn seed producers of Malaysia and determining costs and return in shrimp/prawn seed production. Data collected from 19 hatcheries (comprising 10 brackishwater shrimp hatcheries and 9 freshwater prawn hatcheries) from the states of Penang, Perak, Terengganu and Selangor were used in the study. Data Envelopment Analysis was applied to estimate efficiency scores of the hatcheries. Besides, cost, return and profitability of hatcheries was examined using farm management procedure. The TECRS (overall technical efficiency) was found to be 0.582 for brackishwater shrimp hatcheries and 0.692 for freshwater prawn hatcheries. Pure technical efficiency (TEVRS) averaged 0.907 for shrimp hatcheries and 0.918 for prawn hatcheries indicating that inefficiencies to the level of 9-10 percent do exist. Allocative efficiency (AE) and cost efficiencies (CE) were 0.78 and 0.70 for brackishwater shrimp hatchery and 0.79 and 0.73 for freshwater prawn hatcheries suggesting that the realized level of spawn/fry could be produced by the hatcheries by spending 21-22 percent less on inputs

The factors of selecting Malaysia as tourist destination

Tourism is an emerging economic sector for Malaysia.The purpose of this study is an attempt to understand the factors that attract tourists to visit Melaka State of Malaysia.The primary data were collected through questionnaire survey on 735 tourists who visited the state of Melaka, Malaysia.This study used descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modelling (SEM) in order to analyze and draw the inferences.Model fit was initially tested using the overall fit and regression paths. Then the hypothesized model was analysed and modified based on the results of the analysis to find a better fit of the data and to more adequately describe the relationships between the factors. The study found that several economic, environmental, cultural and community factors have positive significant influence in attracting tourists to Melaka

Stochastic modeling of production risk and technical efficiency of Thai koi (Anabas testudineus)farming in Northern Bangladesh

Thai koi is one of the high commercially valued farm fishes which have expanded tremendously in the northern part of Bangladesh. However, despite its impressive growth in the initial years, output of the industry is highly volatile across different years and farms. This research, following the Just and Pope framework, has made use of Kumbhakar’s (2002) extended stochastic frontier model (SFM) to estimate production risk and technical efficiency (TE) in Thai koi farming. Results show that feed is the most important input significantly influencing production. Zeolite and pesticide appear to be risk-reducing, while fingerlings, labor, feed and salt turn out to be risk-increasing inputs. The inefficiency model indicates that labor and pond area significantly reduce the technical inefficiency. Feed, fingerling and lime also act as TE-improving factors. Education of farmers improves TE, while experience, training and frequency of water change do not impact the TE. The mean TE scores are 0.73 and 0.96 for the flexible risk estimate and conventional SFM estimates, respectively. TE values appear to become exaggerated when production risk is excluded from the model. SFM recognizes that risk is involved in Thai koi farming that causes lower TE