Safflower grown in the western U.S. is often produced for birdseed mixes. Increasing demand for birdseed products, combined with regional drought, has shrunk western safflower availability. To satisfy the growing demand, processors may look to contracting strategies to incentivize production. We compare expected risk and corresponding certainty equivalents both from the processor and producer viewpoints under various contracting mechanisms and risk aversion levels. Results suggest that contracts containing a combination of lump sum acreage payments and fixed price performance payments would incentivize producer adoption of safflower while maintaining processor profitability and limiting the risk exposure of both parties.

UK labour productivity is significantly lower than that of many other similarly advanced economies and has been so for decades, with negative implications for UK living standards. To make matters worse, during the last ten years labour productivity growth has stalled in most industrialised countries, and particularly in the UK. This has led to a renewed policy focus on productivity growth, as evidenced by successive government productivity plans and efforts to re-invigorate industrial strategy. This paper reviews the evidence on UK productivity performance, identifying what we know about the causes of its weakness, what we do not know and what this means for policy. We review the evidence through the lens of developments in economic measurement, drawing in particular on the work of National Institute colleagues past and present, and with a view to the key measurement challenges ahead that, unlocked, will help us understand better what is holding back UK productivity.

The literature on internationalisation processes in family businesses has boomed with the emergence of new approaches and different perspectives. One of these schemes analyses the so-called born-again global firms, mostly technology companies, which experienced an internationalisation process after one or more serious incidents affecting it. The case of Ines Rosales extends the frontier of the meaning of a global born-again firm to firms in industries and traditional products. One of its most striking aspects is that the flagship product is centennial and based on basic ingredients. In addition, the production process of the firm mix production by hand and mechanised developments. Inés Rosales shows the ability of a family Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) in a process of internationalisation even in culturally distant markets through the traditional cake of olive oil.