Journal of Agricultural Economics and Development
Year:2005 | Volume:13 | Issue:3 (51)|Papers Count:11

Agriculture sector has an important place in the economy of Kerman province. In this region the main source of water supply for agriculture is groundwater. The high rate of annual shortage in groundwater supplies is due to excessive pumping. With respect to this fact, economic valuation of water and considering the side effects of excessive pumping of groundwater supplies is extremely important.With the aim of studying the above mentioned matters, suitable production function was estimated; and on the base of this variation, economic value was calculated per unit of water.At the second stage of the research, the cost and social welfare functions were estimated; then the peripheral effects of excessive pumping were calculated, using social welfare function. Finally, by production function, the demand elasticity for input water was calculated. The findings indicated that the marginal production of wheat per unit of water was higher than the corresponding cost of pumping, and that excessive pumping of water would decrease in the social welfare rate of wheat farmers.The research concluded that increasing the pumping costs would not lead to any significant impact on the rate of extraction, so the best way to increase irrigation efficiency is to promote efficient irrigation methods.

Achieving food supply stability and food security is considered as a strategic decision in many countries.This research aimed to select the most effective option to fulfill food security as a national strategy by the use of a multiple attribute decision making approach with serial structure in four levels, including:1. Expanding food security by internal resource-based production as a major principle of food security (decision making target).2. Considering the main factors that influence stable food supply, such as population, production, prices, export, import and national income, according to recent studies.3. Considering variables effective internal resource-based production, including production pattern, consumption pattern, environment (soil and climate) and technology.4. The most effective option as a national strategy to realize food security.This article amid to determine preference vector by considering pair-wise comparison matrixes in different processes and then in each stage for authenticating final results. Consistency index is also utilized.

In this study, linkages between past and current food consumption in rural areas was studied by calculating a habit effect besides substitution and income effects. For this purpose, applying an expenditure function, the growth of expenditure shares for various groups of foods was evaluated considering these effects. Typical results showed that habit has a significant role in consumption pattern. Also, considering money illusion, it seems that income has no significant effect on consumption. Taking into account the past consumption patterns, consumers try to keep those foods in their current patterns that either have been less expensive or are produced by households.

The importance of technical and vocational education in enabling people to gain access to employment and participate in the society through economic activity is clear. A well designed and well delivered technology education curriculum can enhance future workforce productivity, because it reinforces what students have learned in other curricular areas, is ideal for enhancing cognitive process abilities, and promotes active involvement with technology. The future competitiveness of Iranian hand-woven carpet depends on access to up-to-date and productive technologies, optimization structure, and the management skills of carpet weavers. This project seeks to quantify one of these competitiveness factors, namely, the relative efficiency of individual technical and vocational carpet weavers compared to traditional weavers and the best practice in the industry. The data used for empirical analysis was collected from 339 weavers and other relevant data from 2002 survey. The results showed that weavers who had participated in technical and vocational education programmes were less efficient than traditional weavers.

It has been widely discussed that agriculture differs from the non farm sector of the economy. Distinction should be made between the livestock and crop sectors, because of wide differnces between the two. Indeed, different policies must be implemented in livestock industry.Policy maker need to know the response of farmers and consumers to the changing economic and non-economic conditions in the industry. They must know the effects on several target variables, such as production, consumption, imports, etc, as exerted by the determinant ones, in order to direct the latter towards the best possible ends. These determinant variables may be either exogenous or endogenous. This guidance to policy-makers may be provided in the form of estimated statistical relationships among the relevant variables of the industry in question. A complete system of equations may be built for each sector or industry. The relevant structural parameters are estimated based on Iran meat consumption data over the period of 1971–2001, using the single equation and other simultaneous equation methods.

Cropping pattern in different regions should be determined with regard to resources limitation and the availability of fertile land. This can be carried out by developing a multiregional cropping pattern model. As a comprehensive and integrated model, this system can be regionally separated and may allow for distinguishing the shared and unshared resources. The regional separation of the model increases the precision of the model for every region; and placing these regions in one comprehensive model makes it possible to provide a trans regional outlook.The results revealed that the application of the multiregional model enhanced the profit by 2.03%, as compared with the present situation. It also reduced unfarmed land area by 3% compared to the sum of three individual models. Sharing the resources caused a more profitable product such as dry-farmed wheat to replace dry- farmed barley in the provincial model. This indicated that sharing rare resources could be useful for increasing profitability. Moreover, the implementation of the proposal in present situation was feasible through the optimal allocation of pesticides and fertilizers and increasing the efficiency of the banking system.

In the absence of adequate applied environmental studies, this research estimated a stochastic normalized output distance function, using econometric stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), for livestock slaughterhouses. The production data for 2003 was collected and the environmental pollution parameters (biochemical, chemical and microbial pollution) were measured by analyzing the wastewater samples from entry and egress channels of effluent treatment systems in all livestock slaughterhouses located in Tehran province. The environmental and resource use efficiencies were also estimated and compared between different groups of slaughterhouses. The effectiveness of treatment systems in improving the environmental performance was determined by statistical tests. The results revealed that most firms were inefficient as their environmental and resource use efficiencies were 57.74 and 52.75, respectively. However, the improvement of the environmental performance was possible with current technologies. The efficiencies showed better status for mechanized and non-public firms and those using biological systems as compared to public and traditional ones. Finally, suggestions were given in order to improve the environmental efficiency. This approach was suggested to environmental planners and policymakers as an applied and scientific basis for evaluating the environmental performance of firms.

Similar to national markets, anti-competitive behavior may cause monopoly power in international markets. Firms and countries may use strategic and coordinated measures to distort the market form competition market to monopoly. Concentration is an index that can be used as a proxy for the degree of monopoly or competition. This index contains the information about the numbers of firms and the way market shares are distributed among the firms in any market. The main aim of this paper is to assess the degree of competition in those international markets in which Iranian export items have a prominent place. To evaluate the degree of competition, concentration indices have been used. The estimated concentration indices, HHI and CRn, have shown that the structure of the above mentioned markets are tight oligopoly.During 1977-2000 the extent of HHI and CRn increased in world markets for items such as date, carpet , caviar, raisins, and saffron, which attested to the increasing monopoly power in these markets. On the other hand there was no significant evidence for changing of concentration in world markets for apple and grape.

A theoretically consistent framework for examining dynamic ex-ante agricultural input demand system (DEID) is developed. This paper outlines a theoretically consistent framework for examining a dynamic ex-ante input demand. Results from duality theory are incorporated into a long run dynamic optimization framework. Net investment is specified to give rise to increasing internal costs of adjustment, resulting in capital inputs being quasi-fixed. Input use is affected by adjustment costs, which permits sluggish factor adjustment. This adjustment cost hypothesis is invoked to specify a system of dynamic investment system under production uncertainty. An ex-ante cost function approach is proposed by embedding the dual distance function computation of expected output within the estimation process. The application to Canadian agriculture resulted that agricultural machinery is a quasi-fixed input with significant adjustment costs and slow rate of adjustment.