Contents Volume 18 2001

Volume Contents

Contents Volume 18 2001     

The relative efficiency of slave agriculture: a reply

Professors Hofler and Folland have written a very interesting paper, which brings out several interesting ideas and is a contribution to the literature. They argue that their results contradict those of our original paper concerning the relative efficiency of small versus large slave farms. Specifically they find that large slave farms are relatively more efficient. However, they have missed that main point of the original paper which was to compare the relative efficiency of slave and non-slave farms. On this issue, the Holfer and Folland comment provides no additional insight. Thus their paper, while interesting, is not a comment on our original work.     

Effective rates of protection and the Fordney–McCumber and Smoot–Hawley Tariff Acts

This study presents the first calcualtions of effective rates of protection for 1920, 1923 and the first and second half of 1930 for the United States economy disaggregated to 39 sectors. The calculated changes in the effective on the United States economy of the Emergency and Fordney–McCumber tariff acts of 1921 and 1922 and of the Smooth–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

The results suggest that the Emergency and Fordney–McCumber tariff acts resulted in a much larger increase in the level of protection given to American industry than the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Further, the results indicate that Smoot-Hawley had a small effect on the level of protection.     

Technical Change and Measuring Pollution Abatement Costs: An Activity Analysis Framework

The cornerstones of studies that estimate the effectof environmental regulations on an economy areestimates of the pollution abatement costs incurred bythe manufacturing and electric utility sectors.However, there are concerns regarding the accuracy ofthe surveys used to generate these cost estimates.This paper demonstrates that technical change tends toresult in an increasing share of pollution abatementcosts being impossible to measure. This finding hasimportant implications for estimating the productivityeffects of environmental regulations, developingregulatory budgets, and data collection effortsrelated to environmental accounting.     

ENVIRONMENT-ECONOMIC ACCOUNTING AND INDICATORS OF THE ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ACTIVITIES

In this paper, we define environmental protection (EP) activities in the context of an input-output (I-O) framework. The U.S. I-O table is adjusted to separate inputs purchased by various economic sectors to abate pollution. We use I-O concepts and the I-O matrix adjusted for EP activities to derive a matrix of inputs to EP activities, which is independent of the matrix of inputs to traditional economic activities. This matrix is the basis for deriving measures of the economic importance of EP activities, including the size of EP activities relative to GNP and direct employment and indirect employment attributable to EP activities.     

Adjusting the measurement of US manufacturing productivity for air pollution emissions control

We estimate a distance function and derive producer shadow prices for SO₂ and PM-10 emissions. The shadow prices are used to adjust a traditional measure of total factor productivity growth in order to account for the reallocation of inputs from production of the marketed output to pollution abatement activities. Adjusted total factor productivity growth rates are calculated for the two-digit SIC manufacturing industries in the United States for 1970–1996. The results indicate that including the “output” of pollution abatement activities has a measurable effect on the productivity of many industries in the manufacturing sector.     

Technological Change in Illinois Agriculture, 1982-1984

This paper has two main purposes: (1) to develop a method for measuring the extent and bias of technical change which involves the use of non-parametric production frontiers and does not require information on prices or factor shares; (2) to apply this method to individual farm data drawn from a sample of Illinois grain farms for the years 1982 and 1984. The results indicate that technical innovation is land using in nature and that the rate of technical change is related to the size of farm.     

Social responsibility: U.S. power plants 1985–1998

This study introduces an Environmental Performance Index (EPI) to assess the performance of firms that produce both good and bad outputs. In the one good output one bad output case, the EPI simplifies to the ratio of good–bad output for period t + 1 and period t. After deriving the index, data for U.S. coal-fired power plants from 1985 to 1998 are used to demonstrate insights that the EPI can provide. We find that power plants with units participating in Phase I of the Acid Rain Program experience a dramatic improvement in their EPI during 1994–1995.

Effective rates of protection and the Fordney-McCumber and Smoot-Hawley Tariff Acts: comment and revised estimates

This paper provides corrected calculations of the effective rate of protection for a wide disaggregation of US industries under the two important interwar tariff regimes.