Perceptions of Quality and Household Water Usage: A Representative Study in Jacksonville,FL

International Advances in Economic Research - When faced with the fear of low-quality tap water, households are motivated to seek out and use alternatives. This study investigated the role of...     

The importance of managing the costs and benefits of bird activity for agricultural sustainability

The behaviour of wild animal species in agricultural landscapes may confer benefits to growers through the provision of ecosystem services (e.g. control of agricultural pests) or inflict costs through direct or indirect damage to crops or livestock. The literature on the costs that species inflict or the benefits they provide has evolved largely independently with few attempts to synthesize information across studies. However, managing cost–benefit trade-offs to maximize agricultural productivity while ensuring native species conservation is vital to the future of ecologically sustainable agriculture. Using birds as a case study, we review the two bodies of literature on the costs and benefits attributed to bird activity in agricultural landscapes. In each case, we examine the major types of costs (e.g. consumption of crops) and benefits (e.g. pollination of crops) and assess approaches to quantifying these in terms of changes in crop yield or monetary value. We then synthesize this information to examine options for balancing cost–benefit trade-offs through coordinated and integrated management strategies that consider all aspects of species activity in agricultural landscapes. Employing strategies that successfully balance costs and benefits is fundamental to future food security and agricultural sustainability.     

Should the Cost-of-living Index Provide the Conceptual Framework for a Consumer Price Index?

In some countries, the cost-of-living (COL) index serves as the conceptual framework for the CPI, but it has been rejected in others. This paper reviews issues that have arisen in the statistical agency debate and in the economics literature on the COL index, including rhetorical matters which have influenced the debate. I contend that COL theory is useful as a decision-making framework in estimating components of the CPI, and that COL index theory provides appropriate guidance for measuring consumer inflation, contrary to the view that has been adopted for the European HICP and expressed by an advisory committee for the RPI.     

ASSESSING THE QUALITY ERROR IN OUTPUT MEASURES: THE CASE OF REFRIGERATORS*

This paper computes new indexes of output for refrigerators, using hedonic methods to adjust for quality change. The hedonic technique is applied in a new way (it is used to make quality adjustments to prices before they are used in the index), and the results are compared with those from methods used in previous hedonic investigations. There are three major findings. (1) Overall (1960–1972), our hedonic deflated output series rise more rapidly than conventional measures, because the price indexes used for deflation rise more slowly. (2) The output measures fluctuate more than do output measures produced by conventional methods, because adding hedonic quality adjustments to WPI indexes moves them up in some years and down in others, and the resulting adjustments to the output series were positively correlated with changes in output. (3) Applying methods used in previous studies produces larger adjustments to the published indexes, suggesting that some of the differences noted in previous studies between hedonic indexes and official published indexes are related to computational methods, not to quality adjustment.