This thesis investigates the relationship between groundnut cash cropping decisions and household food security in two regions of sub-Saharan Africa.  Particular attention is paid to how the gender of groundnut growers influences this relationship.  Additionally, the thesis examines how gender influences household marketing decisions.  Household groundnut production and marketing data was obtained using surveys administered in eastern Uganda and central Ghana.  A food consumption score developed by the World Food Program is used as a quantitative measure of food security.  Measures of household groundnut cultivation intensity are specified using data on household groundnut production and marketing levels.  An OLS regression estimates the relationship between the food consumption score and measures of cash cropping intensity and other cash crop production decisions.  Apart from the OLS regression, a tobit model is employed to estimate the gender effects on household marketing decisions, examining both the decision to participate in a market and the decision concerning the amount to market.  Cash cropping decisions are found to play no role in the determination of food security.  While the presence of female groundnut growers in a household has a small positive effect on the food consumption score, there is no identifiable gender influence upon the cash cropping and food security relationship.  The tobit model results indicate no gender effect upon household marketing decisions. / Master of Science

During the period 1909-1949 many changes took place in agricultural production and cash farm income in Cache County, Utah, Important factors which caused changes in agricultural production and cash farm income during this period were technological developments in farm power and machinery, plant and animal breeding, changes in consumer demands price changes, and climatic conditions. The influence of these factors on both production and income varied with the enterprise, the commodity, and the year studied.

Return on marketing investment has received attention for a long period of time. On the other hand, customers and the value that they bring to a company have enjoyed increased attention lately. Concepts like customer obsession, customer life time value, customer delight, customer equity and other topics have been researched by a number of scholars. Customer equity as a marketing concept is the latest in marketing research. The concepts purport that management of a company should be able to calculate the value added to the company by its current and future customers. Such value is then discounted using the appropriate discount rate i.e. weighted average cost of capital (WACC). This research focused on the possibility of using Customer Equity to calculate enterprise value. The purpose was to determine whether any variance between results of the two methods is statistically significant and whether or not a relationship between CE based enterprise value and discounted cash flow (DCF) based enterprise value exist. From the analysis conducted it was concluded that no statistically significant variance existed between Customer Equity based enterprise value and DCF enterprise value. It was also noted that a relationship exist between customer equity and an enterprise value calculated using the DCF model. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

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Life insurance policies are not equally profitable is sense of expected value. In practice, profitability is an output of complex cash flow models, which need utilizing special systems and the run time of such calculation can be significant if number of policies is high. Therefore we consider variables, which change most frequently, stimulate the profitability model with several values of these variables and then we search for a regression model to explain the changes. We apply Gamma regression on the data. But what if there exist some policies which are negative? Then we determine these policies with logistic regression applied on data censored to the binary form. Loss of these policies is modelled using symmetrical Gamma model. These three models, when considered together, can be viewed as a single model, which is a generalization of the well known zero inflated count model. The most interesting part of inference in such model is diagnostics. We show that the basic types of residuals - Pearson, deviance and quantile - can be defined. We also build an ordinary linear model and we compare utility of these two approaches. While building models, we meet various statistical issues like dimension reduction of yield curve or dispersion proportional to sum insured. 1

A computerized dairy herd simulation was developed to evaluate the economic impact of changing length of lactation relative to length of dry period in a dairy herd. It created weekly production for individual cows in a typical herd. Cows were dried off early if they were producing below a designated daily milk yield. They were replaced with fresh cows to produce more daily milk and increase profit while maintaining a constant number of cows in milk (98 to 102). A two by four factorial of dry off strategies was designed using rates of lactation decline of 6% and 8% and early dry off at 8, 13, 18, and 23 kg. Cows producing less than this for 2 wk consecutively were dried off. There were 100 cows in each herd and each of the eight scenarios was run 10 times (10 herds) for 80 herds total. Dry cow groups at 8, 13, 18, and 23 kg dry off were 14, 17, 23, and 32% of total herds, respectively. Average daily milk (kg) increased for the four dry kg: 30.4, 31.2, 32.3, and 33.7 kg/d per milking cow, whereas RHA decreased. Three different milk-feed income scenarios, (+20%, average, -20%) were combined with three dry cow costs, (+20%, average, and -20%). Nine combinations were analyzed statistically at each rate of decline. Net cash income changed $3561, $1571, and $-3051 from 8 to 13 to 18 to 23 kg dry kg under a normal economic situation. Net farm income under the same scenario changed $3170, $2945, and $-1154. Under the best economic situation, net cash income increased with each successive dry kg, $5086, $4248, and $921. Net farm income also increased by $4695, $5621, and $2819. Net cash income and net farm income were largest at 13 and 18 kg when milk-feed income was low and dry cow cost was high, the worst economy scenario. Only in the most optimistic economic situations does it appear practical for a dairy business to adopt early dry off beyond 13 kg/d per cow given the small gains and the yearly variability. Strategies of dry off at larger dry kg, although not greatly profitable, nevertheless were not extremely unprofitable either. / Master of Science

The wood supply system is a dynamic and complex structure. Traditionally, key components of the system have been treated as stand-alone entities with very little regard to the performance of the overall system. The central component, the logging contractor, is usually viewed as a service provider and largely ignored. A value chain approach is an excellent tool to examine the primary stakeholders’ contributions to the wood supply system. The value chain for forestry usually extends completely across the physical and political landscape, reaching into the most geographically and economically remote locations. A conceptual model was developed depicting the wood supply system value chain and the socioeconomic impacts of a logging firm’s cash flow contributions. Financial and production data were obtained from 93 independent logging firms from 18 Eastern US States. This analysis provided 690 business years of data, beginning with the 1988 financial year and concluding in 2005. In addition, three impact scenarios were modeled using Impact Analysis for Planning (IMPLAN) software to understand the effects of Hurricane Katrina. The first model addressed the economic impacts of a timber deficit from the landowner’s perspective, the second introduced a disruption in the wood supply system from a logger’s position in the value chain, and the third attempted to analyze the impacts of a mill closure. Data analysis showed that operating costs have increased drastically during the study period with payment for services failing to provide adequate compensation to contractors. Furthermore, no significant per unit cost incentive was found to justify expanding the scale of operation. Smaller-volume producers appeared to have more ability to generate a profit on operations than their larger-volume counterparts. Cash flow analyses revealed much of the economic activity generated by the wood supply system remained in the local community. Some deficiencies of IMPLAN appeared upon examining the models introduced in this research. Many rural communities across the Southeastern US are heavily dependent on production forestry. When the logging industry suffers, so does the entire economy of these regions. It is important to ensure that the socioeconomic impacts of the wood supply value chain for such communities remains intact.

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