Interprovincial Reallocation of Market Sharing Quota for Industrial Milk

This paper examines allocations of industrial milk quota across provinces in Canada under two hypothetical scenarios. The study focuses on the case where considerable reallocation of production occurs across farms and provinces due to changes in the distribution of quota holdings. The allocations are determined using linear programming (LP) analysis, where the objective of the optimization problem is to minimize the delivered cost of products such as cheese, butter, ice cream, and yogurt. The LP model seeks to meet provincial targets for domestic disappearance on a milk-equivalent basis in the short to medium term, where limits are imposed on the maximum achievable growth of production and processing capacity in any one I he conclusions are that reallocation of existing quota across farms and provinces has a potential to reduce considerably the costs of industrial milk production and the cost of transporting manufactured products.     

The impact of protection and concentration on the labour intensity of U.K. industries

fr]Résumé L’effet de la protection et de la concentration sur l’intensité de main d’oeuvre des industries du Royaume-Uni. — Cette étude teste empiriquement la proposition que la structure du tarif douanier dans les pays industrialisés permet une protection plus haute en faveur des industries relativement fortes à main d’oeuvre. L’étude suggère que non seulement le niveau de protection mais aussi le degré de la concurrence est associé avec les intensités de main d’oeuvre. En utilisant les données pour l’industrie du R. U. les résultats démontrent que l’usage de main d’oeuvre et les co?ts de main d’oeuvre varient positivement avec les taux de protection, nominale ou effective, et négativement avec les rapports de concentration du marché de la production locale.

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Zusammenfassung Der Einflu\ von Protektion und Konzentration auf die Arbeitsintensit?t britischer Industrien. — Diese Studie testet empirisch die Hypothese, da\ die Zolltarifstruktur in Industriel?ndern den relativ arbeitsintensiven Industrien einen gr?\eren Zollschutz gew?hrt. Sie weist darauf hin, da\ nicht nur zwischen dem Protektionsniveau und der Arbeitsintensit?t, sondern auch zwischen dem Wettbewerbsgrad und der Arbeitsintensit?t ein Zusammenhang besteht. Unter Verwendung von Daten aus der britischen Industrie zeigen die Ergebnisse, da\ Arbeitseinsatz und Arbeitskosten mit den (nominalen oder effektiven) Protektionsraten positiv und mit den Konzentrationsgraden auf dem heimischen Markt negativ korreliert sind.

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Resumen El impacto de protecci?n y concentratión sobre la intensidad de mano de obra en las industrias del Reino Unido. — Este estudio examina empiricamente la propositión que la estructura tarifaria de los países industriales brinda una protección mayor a las industrias relativamente más intensivas en mano de obra. El estudio sugiere que no solamente el nivel de la protección sino que también el grado de competencia se asocia con las intensidades de mano de obra. Utilizando datos de la industria del Reino Unido los resultados demuestran, que el uso de mano de obra y el costo varian positivamente con las tasas de protección, nominal o efectiva, y negativamente con las relaciones de concentración del mercado de productión doméstico.

     

An introduction to the Millennium Project

The pace, complexity, and globalization of change requires attention to the future. The change of millennia — the coming of the year 2001 — provides an opportunity, a psychological focus, for a global review of past achievements and problems and a unique chance to assess and reflect on future issues and opportunities.Unfortunately, there is as yet no mechanism or information utility to support a worldwide effort to study past achievements and problems or future issues and opportunities. Although there are many individual, isolated, special purpose, and one-time study efforts underway, there is no international system that can provide coherence or continuity to these studies, including feedback and sharing of information, and, in particular, the systematic exploration of future possibilities and policy alternatives. With growing interest in the future, the spread of instantaneous and global communications, the advent of powerful new nondeterministic modeling techniques, the ability to evoke, capture, and share information and perceptions with systematic questioning techniques and software, the proliferation of data bases, and knowledge visualization, it is now possible for futurists, scholars and others around the world to interact globally and take a fresh look at the future possibilities and policies in ways not previously possible.As the World Bank provides an ongoing system for research and feedback to improve economic policy, so too the United Nations University could provide an ongoing system for the improvement of futures research and its application to the policy process. According to a series of interviews, questionnaires, and meetings with leading futurists and scholars around the world, the proposed “Millenium Project” has the potential to become such a system.This study had as its principal objective determining the design of an information system that could effectively tap contributors, worldwide, to focus on lessons of the past that bear on world issues and the potential of future developments for intensifying or mitigating these and future issues. The first phase of the feasibility study was both methodological and substantive. Worldwide panels of experts contributed their judgments about the method or process of organizing the project; and the system that emerged from this interaction was applied in a prototype study to the issues of growing world population and the environment.During the first phase of the feasibility study, we found that:

1. 1. The Millennium Project is feasible and likely to be helpful to many institutions in examining and resolving policy issues at several levels. An overview of the project design and objectives appears in Section 2 of this article.

2. 2. Organizations that have an issues scanning function, or have a mandate to keep abreast of a broad range of futures thinking, have a need for access to a non-political, scholarly, and international system of future studies. Such organizations have requested continued participation in the second and third phase of this feasibility study, as well as establishing formal relations with the full Millennium Project.

3. 3. While several questions remain, the design features of a system to collect judgments using the Delphi process that were suggested by the international panel (outlined elsewhere in this report) form a straight forward operational system. Among the remaining questions are the design and use of international information systems and data bases, integration with quantitative techniques such as system modeling, the requirements for special study teams, and institutionalization and financial support. The design of the operational system is described in detail in Section 3 of this report.

4. 4. Cost estimates have been made for establishing international panels and collecting and analyzing information they provide using the Delphi process. Several assumptions are required. If a maximum of four topics are addressed in a particular year, each of the four panels consists of 150–200 people, the staff is kept to a base of three people with an additional 1.5 per panel, and advisors are paid an honorarium of $1.500, then the cost of this element of the full scale Project is likely to be approximately $900,000 per year. While communications modes are important in terms of timing and information access, the costs of communications are the smallest of the Project's cost elements. Detail of our cost estimates appear in Section 7 of this report.

This is not the final feasibility study report, but only a report on part of Phase I. As such, it contains our initial findings about how the Project might be organized. We welcome comments from the reader. Please consider this as work in progress.     

Education and growth: A simple model with complicated dynamics

We construct a simple model of education and growth in which children spend a fraction of their time and parents spend a fraction of their income on education. Both a strategic complementarity and an intergenerational externality are present. The interactions between each pair of consecutive generations lead to rich dynamics. We show that multiple growth equilibria arise, some of them periodic and some aperiodic. We also find a negative correlation between volatility and growth, without a one‐way causal relationship between the two being, necessarily, present. Rather, this negative correlation is driven by the structural characteristics of the economy.     

ICP 2005 Construction Prices: Are They Underestimated in Developing Countries?

Construction prices are lower in developing countries in ICP 2005, which has raised these countries' capital/output ratio in Penn World Tables 7 and 8 and affected growth analyses. We estimate the Colombia/U.S. price ratio for office and apartment buildings in 2005 as a test of the validity of the ICP 2005 methodology for estimating these prices. Our estimate of the Colombia/U.S. price ratio is almost twice the ICP 2005 estimate. We confirm the validity of our results by estimating the cost of constructing office and apartment buildings using 2005 prices for construction materials, equipment, and labor in both countries.     

Where can obesity management policy make the largest impact? Evaluating sub-populations through a microsimulation approach

Background: There is a critical need to focus limited resources on sub-groups of patients with obesity where we expect the largest return on investment. This paper identifies patient sub-groups where an investment may result in larger positive economic and health outcomes.

Methods: The baseline population with obesity was derived from a public survey database and divided into sub-populations defined by demographics and disease status. In 2016, a validated model was used to simulate the incidence of diabetes, absenteeism, and direct medical cost in five care settings. Research findings were derived from the difference in population outcomes with and without weight loss over 15 years. Modeled weight loss scenarios included initial 5% or 12% reduction in body mass index followed by a gradual weight regain. Additional simulations were conducted to show alternative outcomes from different time courses and maintenance scenarios.

Results: Univariate analyses showed that age 45–64, pre-diabetes, female, or obesity class III are independently predictive of larger savings. After considering the correlation between these factors, multivariate analyses projected young females with obesity class I as the optimal sub-group to control obesity-related medical expenditures. In contrast, the population aged 20–35 with obesity class III will yield the best health outcomes. Also, the sub-group aged 45–54 with obesity class I will produce the biggest productivity improvement. Each additional year of weight loss maintained showed increased financial benefits.

Conclusions: This paper studied the heterogeneity between many sub-populations affected by obesity and recommended different priorities for decision-makers in economic, productivity, and health realms.     

A categorical modeling approach to analyzing new product adoption and usage in the context of the building-materials industry

A high proportion of non-adopters is prevalent in any market where the product under consideration is relatively new or has a low acceptance rate. This results in a low proportion of adopters in a representative sample. In adoption or product usage modeling such high proportion of zeros in the dependent variable may be addressed by zero-inflated models, by modeling the product adoption and usage as a function of two latent processes. This paper considers a zero-inflated ordinal-probit model for investigating adoption and usage of innovative wall-cavity insulation materials among residential homebuilders in the US. This study assumes a three-step adoption process of innovative housing materials, namely, trial adoption, intermediate adoption and complete adoption. The study uses 5757 responses from a combined ‘Annual Builder Practices Survey’ dataset comprising ten cross-sectional yearly surveys, undertaken by the NAHB Research Center, from 1996 to 2005. The research results indicate that though a higher proportion of large firms are more likely to adopt innovative insulation material, they continue using established products while slowly increasing their use of the innovative material over time. However, when smaller homebuilders adopt an innovative insulation material, it replaces the existing product from their material usage portfolio at a faster rate.