Explaining the Relative Decline of Agriculture: A Supply-Side Analysis for Indonesia

The relative decline of agriculture in growing economies isa central feature of economic development and a major influenceon agricultural policies. The literature on the causes of thisdecline has focused on the relative price effects arising fromdemand factors, especially Engel's law, rather than on supply-sideinfluences, such as changes in relative factor endowments anddifferential rates of technical change. This article developsa simple structural model of the transformation of the Indonesianeconomy, applying an error correction mechanism to capture thedynamics resulting from disequilibria and the costs of adjustment.The decline in agriculture's share of gross domestic productis found to be caused much less by the relative price effectstypically emphasized in the literature than by capital accumulationand rapid technical change in agriculture.     

Forecasting Using Long-Order Autoregressive Processes: An Example Using Housing Starts

A long autoregressive (AR) modeling procedure for monthly U.S. housing starts data is considered. Neither differencing to remove the trend, nor differencing to remove the seasonal component is required in this method. The model is fitted by a Householder transformation-Akaike AIC criterion algorithm. Forecast performance is compared to that obtained by the Box-Jenkins ARIMA method. The prediction error variance of the long AR model method tends to be smaller than the prediction error variance of the Box-Jenkins model method. The long AR method is well suited for housing market time-series which are characterized by both strong seasonal and slowly changing trend components.