新疆农村基础设施投资与农业发展灰色分析

农业是新疆地区的经济基础,农业经济发展是新疆"三农"问题的核心。农村基础设施投资是推动新疆农业经济的前提条件。因此,正确认识不同的农村基础设施投资对新疆农业经济增长的影响是促进新疆农业持续稳定发展的基本要求。本文分析了新疆农村基础设施投资与农业经济增长的灰色关联,结果表明新疆农业经济增长与农村水利、水电、交通运输、通信和教育等基础设施投资的关联度较高,其中水利设施投资和交通运输投资的关联度是最高。     

A critique of high-value supply chains as a means of modernising agriculture in China: The case of the beef industry

China has embarked on an agricultural modernisation program with far-reaching implications for rural development, food safety and trade. A major focus of China’s agricultural modernisation program has been to build high-value supply chains and large, modern agro-industrial enterprises. This paper provides a critique of these efforts in the case of the high-value beef supply chain. It finds that interventionist policies to fast-track the development of high-value supply chains have perverse outcomes and that a more incremental and facilitative approach to modernisation should be pursued based around the development of mid-value supply chains.     

河西走廊凉州绿色农业示范区环境质量评价

该研究以绿色农业理念为基础,参照国家绿色食品和无公害食品产地环境质量标准,通过大范围调查取样、测试分析,对河西走廊凉州绿色农业示范区环境质量状况进行了评价,示范区土壤、灌溉水及大气环境质量总体状况良好,处于"清洁"水平,达到"安全"等级,符合目前国家所规定的绿色食品及无公害产品环境质量的要求。     

The International Monetary Fund’s interventions in food and agriculture: An analysis of loans and conditions

The mandate and competence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) does not cover food and agriculture policies. While there is anecdotal evidence that the IMF engages in these policies regardless, the state-of-the-art lacks a systematic empirical foundation to identify the extent of its mission creep into these sectors. Based on a combination of machine and human coding, we present a comprehensive database on the IMF’s policy interventions in food and agriculture. Using new data on ‘conditionalities’—policies that governments must implement to access IMF credit—we assess to what extent the IMF has targeted these sectors for the period 1980 to 2014. Our analysis evaluates the agricultural content and ideological orientation of conditions according to whether they promote a developmental state, a night-watchman state, or neither. We find about 2% of all IMF conditions (1105 of 58,406) directly target food and agriculture issues. These are present in 43% of all IMF programs (332 of 781); and affect 100 countries (of the 131 countries that have had an IMF agreement). In addition, our analysis reveals that 59.2% of these conditions embody policy measures in line with night-watchman state policy preferences, 40.1% are model-neutral, and 0.7% developmental. Within the model-neutral category, 23.9% are conditions oriented towards building state capacity; 2.7% have a poverty reduction content; and 2.9% contain pro-environment policies. The IMF’s primary reason for targeting food and agriculture is to enforce fiscal discipline by removing subsidies, yet our analysis identifies that only 8% of these policies abolish subsidies. A more consistent explanation of the IMF’s interest in food and agriculture is its broader mission creep into development policy, and its deep-rooted pro-market ideology.     

A practice-centered analysis of environmental accounting standards: integrating agriculture into carbon governance

Standards for carbon accounting are a core element of environmental governance. We study the production of standards as situated and practical action, which is shaped by opportunities, resource constraints, and existing infrastructure. Careful observations of this work reveals what people do and how they organize their actions relevant to the particular questions, conventions, and resources at hand. We apply this practice-centered, ethnomethodological approach to study the creation of an accounting protocol for nitrous oxide emissions from corn production, an effort within the broader project of enlisting agriculture in carbon markets. We find that efforts to create a far-reaching, rigorous, and efficient standard were frustrated by lack of data, contestation of knowledge claims, and the challenges of collapsing real-world heterogeneity into a model and a set of tidy decision rules. In this sense, carbon accounting standards should be understood as provisional, and potentially unstable, compromises.     

Public policy design: Assessing the potential of new collective Agri-Environmental Schemes in the Marais Poitevin wetland region using a participatory approach

The conciliation between different issues such as agriculture production, biodiversity conservation and water management remains unsolved in many places in the world. As a striking example, the wet grasslands of the Marais Poitevin region (France) presents many obstacles against the integration of these issues, especially in terms of public policy design. The socio-cultural situation in this region shows a high degree of political resistance and questions the relevancy of the current Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) as an incentive for livestock farmers to adopt biodiversity friendly practices favoring the birds’ richness of the area. In this study, we explored the reasons for the poor effect of public policy using a two-fold approach based on ethnographic fieldwork and a role-playing game experiment. The ethnographic fieldwork aimed at understanding the local context and daily lives of farmers and current AES’s difficulties while the observation of the role-playing game session allowed for the exploration of current and alternative policy scenarios. The game represents an archetypal wetland that simulates the grass regeneration, water flows through a canal system and a surrounding network of cultivated plots (wheat, corn, sunflower, alfalfa) and pasture areas. The game is designed for eight players who embody their role in real life, i.e. water managers, biodiversity managers and farmers. The behaviors of the players during the session were observed and analyzed through semantic analysis. The game was structured around two scenarios to allow participants to explore, test and compare the current individual action-oriented AES with alternative collective public policy instruments. Such comparison brings new insights for public policy design. It also highlights the topic of integrated environmental management and questions the relevancy of participatory approaches in striving to resolve contradiction/dilemmas in environmental development.     

Forecasting bulk prices of Bordeaux wines using leading indicators

Agricultural price forecasting has been being abandoned progressively by researchers ever since the development of large-scale agricultural futures markets. However, as with many other agricultural goods, there is no futures market for wine. This paper draws on the agricultural prices forecasting literature to develop a forecasting model for bulk wine prices. The price data include annual and monthly series for various wine types that are produced in the Bordeaux region. The predictors include several leading economic indicators of supply and demand shifts. The stock levels and quantities produced are found to have the highest predictive power. The preferred annual and monthly forecasting models outperform naive random walk forecasts by 27.1% and 3.4% respectively; their mean absolute percentage errors are 2.7% and 3.4% respectively. A simple trading strategy based on monthly forecasts is estimated to increase profits by 3.3% relative to a blind strategy that consists of always selling at the spot price.     

Market constraints,misallocation, and productivity in Vietnam agriculture

We examine important changes in agriculture in Vietnam in the context of ongoing structural changes in the economy. We use a household-level panel dataset and a quantitative framework to document the extent and consequences of factor misallocation in agriculture during the period between 2006 and 2016. Despite rapid growth in agricultural productivity and a reallocation of factor inputs to more productive farmers, we find that misallocation across farmers remains high and increased during the period. Reallocation of factor inputs has not been strong enough to accommodate substantial changes in farm productivity over time. Our analysis also reveals important differences between the north and south regions.     

A flexible time-varying specification of the technical inefficiency effects model

The temporal pattern of technical efficiency in the technical inefficiency effects model, as modeled by Battese and Coelli (Empir Econ 20:325–332, 1995), is rather restrictive. Specifically, it a priori imposes a common pattern upon all firms in the sample, which in addition is monotonic over time. Obviously this is an undesirable implication of the model especially when there is evidence of strong firm heterogeneity and/or a long time span. To overcome this shortcoming, the present paper incorporates the Cornwell et al. (J Econom 46:185–200, 1990) flexible specification of the temporal pattern of technical efficiency into technical inefficiency effects model. The proposed formulation is then applied to the agricultural sector of the EU and US, during the period 1973–1993. The empirical result support the proposed formulation as quite different temporal patterns of technical efficiency have been found for the ten countries included in the analysis. We would like to thank an anonymous referee and an associate editor for valuable suggestions in an earlier version of the paper.     

闽籍华商以及福建-东盟的农业经贸交流

本文通过介绍古代泉州港与海丝路各国的农业交流,并阐述华侨、闽籍华商在东南亚各国的发展现状,探讨中国—东盟自由贸易区(CAFTA)建立后福建外向型农业在东盟的发展战略。