The dwelling unit is often described as the focal point or hub in the delivery of a whole array of services to a household. It delivers “physical space … sanitary and cooking facilities …” and its geographic location provides access to a particular neighborhood and affects proximity and access to jobs, retail stores, public services, association with other people, and cultural and religious facilities. Thus, housing has a very important role in human resource development, and, subsequently, in economic growth and development. In general, housing plays an important role in the quality of life and living.

The food processing industry is Canada's second-largest manufacturing industry. It employed 226,579 people in 1986, and shipments were valued at CDN $47 billion, or 15 percent of the value of total manufactured output that year. More significantly, the food and beverage industries together ranked highest among all manufacturing industries in terms of value added, at CDN $15 billion or approximately 14 percent of total value added in Canadian manufacturing industries in 1986 (Statistics Canada). Given the high degree of competition in this industry in the United States, the history of “comfortable” competition in the food industry in Canada, and the significant contribution of this industry to the Canadian economy, it becomes important to look more carefully at how this industry has been and will be affected by the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA).

Market structure has implications for research policies. The public sector reduced its support for technological change for poultry relative to beef and pork after poultry became integrated. However, market integration causes private sector research to be below the optimal level from society's perspective. In order to get the appropriate response from the private sector, the public sector should not reduce its support for technological change after market integration. Instead, the public sector should increase its support for research such as basic science that complements private sector research.

Not too long ago, most decisions were made by men. Using the brain was considered “unfeminine,” and it was a rare woman who was acquainted with the intricacies of financial planning. Today, things are changing as more and more women realize that prudent action in money matters can mean the difference between a comfortable future and “just getting by.”

The inshore lobster fishery is one of the more important ones in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, accounting for approximately 14 percent of the total landed value of all species in Massachusetts in 1971. Until recent years this fishery accounted for virtually all the pot landings in the state. Despite numerous attempts at conservation such as gear regulation, size restrictions, and prohibitions on harvesting egg-bearing females, the fishery has been subject to rapidly increasing effort and virtually constant landings. In the past decade it has become obvious to many fishery biologists and economists that conservation of fish stocks is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for fisheries management. Resource managers have become increasingly aware of the interdependence between economic factors and the intensity, location and composition of fishing effort.

The presence of allocatable fixed inputs may cause truly joint technologies to appear nonjoint in the short run as well as truly nonjoint technologies to appear joint. This paper demonstrates theoretically why this can happen and then documents that it actually occurs in a significant way in aggregate U.S. agricultural production. A simple testing procedure is used that requires no data on input allocations. The important finding is that failure to reject true (apparent) nonjointness does not justify modeling short-run (long-run) supply independent of alternative output prices.

On most Northeastern dairy farms bull calves are considered a superfluous output and are sent to auction markets as soon as possible after they are born. The excess supply situation in the United States dairy industry combined with other obstacles to dairy herd expansion has resulted in dairy producers seeking expansion options other than increased dairy herd size. Several alternatives for expanding the dairy farm business that utilize bull calves as a resource are possible. Dairy beef systems that are most complementary to the ongoing dairy business should be particularly attractive.

A five-year linear programming farm planning model, permitting the inclusion of nitrogen decay rates, was constructed to include the use of sewage sludge as a primary crop nutrient source. Twenty-two scenarios depicting various operating conditions were examined and maximized net farm incomes compared.

Although only a small percentage difference resulted between the highest and the lowest net revenues over the five-year period, given a variety of operating circumstances, those scenarios including the use of sludge yielded the highest net incomes. Nitrogen application restrictions were at their upper limits when sludge use was included in the optimal solution. The calculation of net present values, for the two sludge contents considered, provided value estimates compatible with the linear programming solutions.

A severance tax can provide local jurisdictions with additional revenues to finance economic development, yet the imposition of a tax may create coal industry employment losses. This research analyzes this issue by examining the demand for Pennsylvania steam coal, providing estimates of the unconditional own price elasticities of demand for coal in each of two demand regions. These estimates in conjunction with labor/output coefficient estimates are used to determine the extent to which coal employment in a region already witnessing slow mining industry growth will be negatively affected.

This paper examines the impact of PST on the optimal production/marketing decisions of a grow-finish hog farm operation. The analysis evaluates PST from three angles: the feed efficiency effect, the leaner meat price effect, and the aggregate-supply-induced price effect. When limited to the feed efficiency effect only, the primary response to the new technology is to increase the animal turnover rate of the operation. When the leaner meat price effect is also included, marketing weight increases while turnover rate remains relatively unchanged. Additionally, if the increased aggregate supply depressed the market price by more than 10%, the benefits from improved feed efficiency and leaner meat will be completely dissipated. Aggregate price adjustments (reductions) of less than 10 percent maintained positive producer benefits resulting from improved feed efficiency and leaner meat.

Farris and Padberg, Krenz, and Boxley have discussed different ways of projecting the distribution of firm sizes. Farris and Padberg utilize Markov chain analysis where transition probabilities were derived from observed changes in firm size for Florida citrus packing firms over a five-year period. Krenz, recognizing the difficulty of securing data with which to estimate transition probabilities, developed rules which could be used to derive transition probabilities from census data. Krenz applied this technique to the size distributions of North Dakota farms. Finally, Boxley applied a completely different technique to estimating farm size distributions in the United States. Boxley's technique involved fitting negative exponential functions to firm size distributions observed from census data. According to Boxley, these functions were sufficiently stable to permit estimation of future firm size distributions.

A long sustained belief that undeveloped natural resources constitute unproductive economic waste has recently been losing ground. Moreover, preserving a natural resource such as wetlands is not preserving something unproductive. On the contrary, the resource can often be considered as socially and economically productive in its undeveloped form. In other words, an unaltered natural resource has the potential of being productive in both material and non-material ways. In making a decision about preservation the relevant point is the social productivity of a resource in its preserved condition as compared to its social productivity in an altered condition.

An econometric model of U.S. and Maine apple production and prices was estimated with ordinary least squares multiple regression. A Gauss-Seidel solution technique was used to examine the equation system goodness of fit and to forecast endogenous variable values. Results indicate that supply expansion in the U.S. and Maine will continue, but Maine's slower rate of increase will erode its market share. Apple prices for the U.S. and Maine are predicted to decline in real terms by the year 2000 if inflation rates exceed 3 percent annually during the period 1982 to 2000.

The current issues of landfill bans, groundwater contamination, waste-end taxes and source reduction of hazardous wastes have rekindled interest in a systems view of environmental management. While this recent interest is new, the basic concept is not. The physical Law of Conservation of Mass as embodied in materials or mass balance has underlain most residuals management research (e.g. Ayres and Kneese [1969]; Kneese and Bower [1979]). As society grapples with the complex problem of toxic and hazardous chemical residues and their distribution in the environment, mass balance is receiving renewed attention in the form of cross-media transfers. The focus of this renewed interest is the movement and transformation of residuals among environmental media (soil, air and water) after discharge. Our early public lessons in applied ecology taught us that the environment is a single integrated system and that there are frequently unintended consequences associated with the human use of that environment. The contemporary lessons from the identification and cleanup of uncontrolled hazardous waste sites under the “Superfund” program lends a new impetus to our reconsideration of these concepts.

Agricultural development in both the United States and Australia has led to suboptimal levels of environmental degradation. While both countries face similar forms of agricultural environmental degradation, the different resource endowment and population distributions have resulted in a different incidence of the costs of these problems. Increasing demand for environmental services and better information on off-site damages have led to increasing demand for reform of agricultural, rural development, and environmental programs to eliminate biases against practices viewed as more environmentally compatible.

Each year various agricultural commodity groups spend millions of dollars advertising and promoting their respective products. Typically such “demand creating” attempts have been purported as a panacea for low producer returns despite their unevaluated performance records. Notwithstanding the magnitude of these promotional expenditures, the literature is scarce regarding the effect of advertising on commodity sales. Such knowledge would provide an invaluable input for promotion expenditure decisions and a means to evaluate the effects of advertising and promotion on economic surplus.

Canadians enjoy the highest possible level of food safety. Despite this fact, there is a public perception and concern about the potential presence of chemical residues in foods and the possible presence of bacteria, such as salmonella and listeria.

Rural residents, particularly recent in-migrants, are often characterized by preferences for a tranquil rural lifestyle based on the attributes of an open countryside. A survey of residents of an isolated rural county in West Virginia was conducted to explore the proposition that recent rural in-migrants are more opposed to the growth of natural resource based activities which are detrimental to the rural countryside than are long-term residents of the County. The hypothesis was not supported, as both recent in-migrants and long-time residents strongly favored economic development of the County's natural resources over preservation of the natural countryside.

One option for the disposal of sewage sludge is land spreading, including application to private croplands. Land spreading may allow some of the sewage treatment costs to the municipality or county to be offset by farmers’ payments for sludge as a crop producing resource. This study investigates the conditions under which a market for sludge will emerge. A linear programming model of a profit maximizing corn for gain farm is formulated and the quantity of sludge available is parametrically varied to trace out marginal productivity curves under various situations. The results for Anne Arundel county, Maryland sludge show a range in value from 0–35 $/ton at application rates from 0–20 tons/acre/year for three years.