Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Australia Since World War II

AustraliaÂ’s lacklustre economic growth performance in the first four decades following World War II was in part due to an anti-trade, anti-primary sector bias in government assistance policies. This paper provides new annual estimates of the extent of those biases since 1946 and their gradual phase-out during the past two decades. In doing so it reveals that the timing of the sectoral assistance cuts was such as sometimes to improve but sometimes to worsen the distortions to incentives faced by farmers. Also, the changes increased the variation of assistance rates within agriculture during the 1950s and 1960s, reducing the welfare contribution of those programs in that period. While the assistance pattern within agriculture appears not to have been strongly biased against exporters, its reform has coincided with a substantial increase in export orientation of many farm industries. The overall pattern for Australia is contrasted with that revealed by comparable new estimates for other high-income countries.Distorted incentives, manufacturing protection, agricultural assistance, trade policy reform

The roots of self-awareness

In this paper we provide an account of the structural underpinnings of self-awareness. We offer both an abstract, logical account-by way of suggestions for how to build a genuinely self-referring artificial agent-and a biological account, via a discussion of the role of somatoception in supporting and structuring self-awareness more generally. Central to the account is a discussion of the necessary motivational properties of self-representing mental tokens, in light of which we offer a novel definition of self-representation. We also discuss the role of such tokens in organizing self-specifying information, which leads to a naturalized restatement of the guarantee that introspective awareness is immune to error due to mis-identification of the subject

Agricultural markets and risks - management of the latter, not the former

The authors review the historical relationship between the work of applied economists, and policymakers, and the institutions that came to characterize the commodity, and risk markets of the 1980s. These institutions were a response to the harmful consequences of commodity market volatility, and declining terms of trade. But the chosen policies, and instruments relied on market interventions, to directly affect prices, or the distribution of prices in domestic, and international markets. For practical, and more fundamental reasons, this approach failed. The authors next discuss how a growing body of work, contributed to a change in thinking that moved policy away from stabilization goals, toward policies that emphasized the management of risks. They distinguish between the macroeconomic effects of volatile commodity markets, and the consequences for businesses, and households. The authors argue that both sets of problems remain important development issues, but that appropriate policy instruments are largely separate. Nonetheless, because governments, households, and firms must all respond to a wide range of sources of risk, they emphasize the role for an integrated policy by government. Increasingly, alternative approaches have come to rely on market-based instruments. Such approaches accept the market view of relative prices as immutable, but address directly the negative consequences of volatility. As traditional risk markets (such as futures and insurance markets) expand, and new parametric markets emerge, the practicality of applying market-based instruments to traditional risk, and development problems increases. The authors show the change in approaches to risk, and the reliance on old, and new market instruments, with new, and sometimes experimental programs, with special emphasis on programs at the World Bank.Labor Policies,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Health Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Intermediation

Approaches to monitoring, control and management of harmful algal blooms (HABs)

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Ocean & Coastal Management 52 (2009): 342-347, doi:10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2009.04.006.Virtually every coastal country in the world is affected by harmful algal blooms (HABs, commonly called “red tides”). These phenomena are caused by blooms of microscopic algae. Some of these algae are toxic, and can lead to illness and death in humans, fish, seabirds, marine mammals, and other oceanic life, typically as a result of the transfer of toxins through the food web. Sometimes the direct release of toxic compounds can be lethal to marine animals. Non-toxic HABs cause damage to ecosystems, fisheries resources, and recreational facilities, often due to the sheer biomass of the accumulated algae. The term “HAB” also applies to non-toxic blooms of macroalgae (seaweeds), which can cause major ecological impacts such as the displacement of indigenous species, habitat alteration and oxygen depletion in bottom waters. Globally, the nature of the HAB problem has changed considerably over the last several decades. The number of toxic blooms, the resulting economic losses, the types of resources affected, and the number of toxins and toxic species have all increased dramatically. Some of this expansion has been attributed to storms, currents and other natural phenomena, but human activities are also frequently implicated. Humans have contributed by transporting toxic species in ballast water, and by adding massive and increasing quantities of industrial, agricultural and sewage effluents to coastal waters. In many urbanized coastal regions, these inputs have altered the size and composition of the nutrient pool which has, in turn, created a more favorable nutrient environment for certain HAB species. The steady expansion in the use of fertilizers for agricultural production represents a large and worrisome source of nutrients in coastal waters that promote some HABs. The diversity in HAB species and their impacts presents a significant challenge to those responsible for the management of coastal resources. Furthermore, HABs are complex oceanographic phenomena that require multidisciplinary study ranging from molecular and cell biology to large-scale field surveys, numerical modelling, and remote sensing from space. Our understanding of these phenomena is increasing dramatically, and with this understanding come technologies and management tools that can reduce HAB incidence and impact. Here I summarize the global HAB problem, its trends and causes, and new technologies and approaches to monitoring, control and management, highlighting molecular probes for cell detection, rapid and sensitive toxin assays, remote sensing detection and tracking of blooms, bloom control and mitigation strategies, and the use of large-scale physical/biological models to analyze past blooms and forecast future ones.: NOAA Cooperative Agreement NA17RJ1223; NIEHS Grant 1 P50 ES012742 and NSF Grant OCE-0430724 through the Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health; NSF Grant OCE-0402707 and NOAA Grant NA05NOS4191149 through the NOAA/UNH Cooperative Institute for Coastal and Estuarine Environmental Technology

Impact of Inundation and Changes in Garrison Diversion Project Plans on the North Dakota Economy

This report attempts to identify the economic consequences of the Garrison Diversion Unit and North Dakota's Missouri River impoundments from the state's perspective. The authors hope it will assist individuals and groups making decisions affecting the future development of North Dakota's water resources.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Logic, self-awareness and self-improvement: The metacognitive loop and the problem of brittleness

This essay describes a general approach to building perturbation-tolerant autonomous systems, based on the conviction that artificial agents should be able notice when something is amiss, assess the anomaly, and guide a solution into place. We call this basic strategy of self-guided learning the metacognitive loop; it involves the system monitoring, reasoning about, and, when necessary, altering its own decision-making components. In this essay, we (a) argue that equipping agents with a metacognitive loop can help to overcome the brittleness problem, (b) detail the metacognitive loop and its relation to our ongoing work on time-sensitive commonsense reasoning, (c) describe specific, implemented systems whose perturbation tolerance was improved by adding a metacognitive loop, and (d) outline both short-term and long-term research agendas

Analysis of Selected Basis Relationships for Spring Wheat

Marketing,

TRAVEL COST MODELS, HETEROSKEDASTICITY, AND SAMPLING

Using theoretical derivations, it is shown that collecting data on individuals' visitation rates to a recreation site by each of these methods: (1) on-site sampling of visits; (2) sampling individuals surrounding the recreations site; and (3) sampling license holders, results in three unique heteroskedacity problems. A different weighted least squares approach is offered in each case when estimating the visits per capita-travel cost relationship in zonal travel cost models. Furthermore, to the extent that individuals within an origin zone face different prices, there is an inherent aggregation bias when estimating consumer surplus.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Australia and New Zealand

In 1990, Australia and New Zealand were ranked around 25th and 35th in terms of GNP per capita, having been the highest-income countries in the world one hundred years earlier. The poor performance over that long period contrasts markedly with that of the past 15 years, when these two economies out-performed most other high-income countries. This difference in growth performance is due to major economic policy reforms during the past two to three decades. We provide new evidence on the extent of governmental distortions to agricultural incentives in particular in the two economies since the late 1940s, both directly and indirectly (and negatively) via manufacturing protection.Distorted incentives, agricultural and trade policy reform, Agricultural and Food Policy, F13, F14, Q17, Q18,