Estimation of Agricultural Production Functfons on a World-Wide Basis

Agricultural production is becoming increasingly capital and research intensive. Hayami and Ruttan, along with others, have developed and applied the metaproduction functional approach to the examination of this phenomenon on a worldwide basis. Limitations to the approach derive from a restrictive functional form chosen for estimation, and from a restrictive specification of agricultural capital and land. This study addresses those difficulties by use of the flexible translog functional form for estimation and by specifying an overall agricultural capital index and a land measure incorporating differences in the quality of land (agricultural natural resource) endowments. Estimation results indicate that agricultural comparative advantage in production is likely shifting to developed countries relative to LDC's due to capital constraints in the latter. Also agricultural potential (i.e., land endowments) do not serve to differentiate nations on the basis of agricultural production. Investment in agriculture, including land improvement, is key to the determination of comparative advantage. La production agricole fait appelle de plus en plus a beaucoup de re-cherches et de capitaux. Hayami et Ruttan, avec d'autres, ont developpe et appliqué l'approche fonctionnelle métaproduction pour examiner ce phénomena à l‘échelle du monde. Les limitations de cette approache provienneent de la forme fonctionnelle restrictive choisie pour l'estimation, et de la spécification restrictive de capitaux et terres agricoles. Cette étude traite ces difficultés en utilisant la formule “translog’ fonctionnelle adaptable pour l'estimation et en spécificant un indice du capital agricole global et une mesure de terre qui incorpore les différences du qualité des terres agricoles (ressources agricoles naturelles). Tous les résultats estimatifs indiquent que l'avantage comparatif agricole de production s'incline vers les pays développés parraport aux PMD dû aux constraintes de capitaux dans ces derniers. Aussi la capacité agricole (c'est à dire la richesse des sols) ne sert pas à différencier les nations sur le plan de production agricole. L'investissement dans l'agriculte, notamment l'amélioration de terre, est la cief pour déterminer l'avantage comparatif.     

Managing New Product Design and Development: an Anglo-German Study

This article reports the results of a study of innovation and product development at 245 manufacturing sites in the UK and Germany. It examines the relationship between design and performance and the competitiveness of the UK and Germany in design and manufacturing. Overall, few sites reached "world-class" standards - 9% in Germany and 3% in the UK, although many sites were not far below these standards.     

A CROSS-NATIONAL STUDY OF LEADERSHIP: PARTICIPATION AS A FUNCTION OF PROBLEM STRUCTURE AND LEADER POWER

This study explores the effects of task structure and leader power on participative leadership across Australian, African, Papua-New Guinea and Pacific Island managers. Managers in all national groups are more participative in situations of low structure and low power than for high structure and high power, respectively. Participation in situations of low structure and low power declines in the order: Australia, Africa, Papua-New Guinea, Pacific Islands. It is argued that this effect is an instrumental effect of managerial education, rather than being culturally determined. the Vroom-Yetton leadership methodology is used to measure participation levels. Subjects are a total of 150 middle-level managers attending management education courses.     

Effects of demographic,experiential, and attitudinal factors on occupational sex stereotypes

The purpose of this study was to (a) compare the occupational sex stereotypes of 366 college students with those reported by Shinar in 1975, and (b) examine the relationships between demographic, experiential, and attitudinal variables and these occupational sex stereotypes. The results indicated a significant difference in occupational ratings from Shinar's study, with females' perceptions shifting more than males' perceptions. In addition, subjects' gender, tenure with female managers, and attitudes toward women as managers, were shown to be significant predictors of occuptational ratings. The implications of these findings for both employees and managers are then discussed.     

Should multivariate early warning systems for banking crises pool across regions?

Most extant work on prediction of banking crises has utilised global samples, which are in turn dominated by observations from middle-income countries, and rely on a single estimator. However, economic and financial structures as well as the pattern of shocks may differ substantially across regions, while a range of specifications is desirable to check robustness. Accordingly, in this paper we test the implicit pooling assumption in earlier multivariate work on Early Warning Systems using both logit and binary recursive tree specifications separately for crises in Asia and Latin America, as well as the pooled sample. Results suggest markedly different crisis determinants across regions, implying global samples are inappropriate.     

Toxic hazard reduction with passive mitigation systems

A major component of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's 112(r) Risk Management Program Rule is the evaluation and control of potential public exposures to toxic chemicals. The rule requires identification and evaluation of a worst case accidental toxic release scenario, but provides for the inclusion of passive mitigation systems in modeling the dispersion hazard zones that are to be communicated to the public. These passive mitigation systems can be taken into account in the consequence modeling if they will withstand the initiating event that causes the accidental release and function as intended. This paper discusses several passive mitigation systems that can be designed as an integral part of storage or processing of highly toxic chemicals. These include, but are not limited to, optimizing storage conditions, design of secondary containment, toxic vapor generation control, and enclosure design. The effectiveness of various passive mitigation systems is evaluated using consequence modeling for case studies involving highly toxic chemicals such as phosgene, chlorine, and ethylene oxide.