Technical efficiency and productivity of maize producers in eastern Ethiopia: a study of farmers within and outside the Sasakawa-Global 2000 project

This paper investigates the technical efficiency of two samples of maize producers in eastern Ethiopia, one involving farmers within the Sasakawa-Global 2000 project and the other involving farmers outside this program. The study uses stochastic frontier production functions in which the technical inefficiency effects are assumed to be functions of the age and education of the farmers, together with the time spent by extension advisers in assisting farmers in their agricultural production operations. For the cross-sectional data obtained for the 1995/96 agricultural year, Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontiers are found to be adequate representations of the data, given the specifications of the translog stochastic frontiers for farmers within and outside the project. The empirical results indicate that farmers within Ihe SO 2000 project are more technically efficient than farmers outside the project, relative to their respective technologies. The mean frontier output of maize lor farmers within the SG 2000 project is significantly greater than that for the farmers outside the project.     

National Security Export Control Regimes: Determinants and Effects on International Business

Countries restrict exports for a number of reasons ranging from national security, foreign policy to the preservation of scarce resources. Most of the restrictions are imposed on military and high‐technology products. This article focuses on national security controls exercised on dual‐use goods, that is, commercial products with current or potential military applications. The article develops a typology of paradigms for national export control regimes: high state–low business, low state–high business, high state–high business, and low state–low business. It then introduces a theoretical model of the economic and political determinants and effects of such paradigms. The study presents national case studies and examines the effects of the four paradigms on international business. The article fills important gaps in our understanding of national export control regimes and their implications for managers of international business firms. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Estimating Input Complementarities with Unobserved Heterogeneity: Evidence from Ethiopia

The level of technology adoption is often characterised as low in Africa. Recent evidence, however, points to the coexistence of substantial heterogeneity across farm households and the lack of a suitable mix of inputs for farmers to take advantage of input complementarities. We use a random coefficients multivariate probit model to quantify the complementarities between agricultural inputs and alternative forms of unobserved heterogeneity effects in modeling farmers' technology adoption decisions. The empirical analysis reveals that, conditional on various types of unobserved heterogeneity effects, farmers' technology adoption decisions exhibit strong complementarity for some inputs. The analysis also reveals substantial unobserved heterogeneity effects. We show that ignoring these behavioural features (unobserved heterogeneity and input complementarity) has important implications in quantifying the effect of some policy interventions that are meant to facilitate technology adoption. In particular, ignoring these features leads to significant overestimation of the effectiveness of extension services.