The gap that exists between the technologies in developed and less developed countries leads to the possibility and necessity of agricultural technology transfer. The lower cost of transfer compared with costs of local development leads to profitable transfer for recipient country. Recipient country must perform local research to adapt the transferred technology to their local needs and to ensure that benefits are distributed in an equitable manner. Is it in the interest of the donor country to sell technology to less developed country? Conventional arguments consider only whether technology transfer to less developed country will be against the donor country's interest in agricultural product exports. It is incomplete. Economic surplus concept has been applied here to discuss both producer's and consumer's gain or lose. An empirical analysis of the U.S.-Mexico agricultural technology transfer showed that both Mexico and United States benefited from the technology transfer.

During the past two decades the fluctuation in the domestic consumption of meat products indicated precarious trends in meat consumption. Furthermore, changes in the prices of goods and income have not fully explained these trends, suggesting that demographic factors have influenced consumer tastes and preferences. Using an iterated procedure for estimating a system of demand equations the effects of own price, cross price, income, and selected household characteristics on the domestic demand for meat products were determined. The selected household characteristics consisted of health information, opportunity cost of time, and the desire for convenience. The significance of the cross price relationships, time trends, and demographic variables suggests certain consumer behavior patterns. These variables indicate that the increased availability of health information negatively affects those products which show visible fat, but not those ground or processed. The employment status of females does not influence meat consumption in any recognizable pattern. And, the acceptance of microwave ovens encourages the consumption of meat that is in ground or processed form, or packaged in small quantities.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 38-08, Section: A, page: 4950. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1977.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 33-11, Section: A, page: 5928. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1972.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Scott H. Irwin. Includes bibliographical references. Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This thesis presents investigations of three topics in non-market valuation; contingent valuation, hedonic property price analysis, and benefit transfer. Chapter Three presents an original analysis of contingent valuation data collected at a popular birding site in California using a heteroskedastic Tobit model. Also the distribution of willingness to pay bids is estimated using kernel density estimation. Chapter Four presents the estimation of a hedonic price function. The purpose of this study is to identify the effects of proximity to the Tanque Verde riparian corridor in Tucson Arizona on the value of homes in the area. The third topic is an analysis of benefit transfer techniques, with particular attention to the transfer of non-market benefit estimates across time. These techniques are presented and evaluated in Chapter Five.

This dissertation reviews the process of maize market liberalization in Kenya, investigates a relationship between market integration and price stability, and presents a theoretical foundation for numerical simulations to evaluate effects of agricultural policies. The computer simulations are used to analyze the market under uncertainty. The model examines welfare effects and response to the policies as well as changes in means and coefficients of variation of maize prices and expected income of farmers. The model solves simultaneously indirect utility maximization of individual farmers and a spatial price equilibrium model to give a rational expectations equilibrium land allocation. It takes account of inseparability of consumption and production, stochastic prices and returns, and effects of size and location of farmers. Maize price is endogenously determined as farmers choose a crop mix between maize and a cash crop. It offers a framework in which various agricultural policies, characteristics of farmers, and conditions of markets can be analyzed.

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An hedonic model of apple prices was developed using data from the three largest producing regions of the United States. Results were used to determine the relative values of selected quality attributes. Specifically, coefficients on the variables produced by the regression represented price premia and discounts for the quality attributes. The variables included in the model were crop year, seasonality, region, variety, size, grade, storage, and a variable designed to measure the impact of the Alar scare on the 1988 crop of Red Delicious apples. Three models were developed. Model I utilized a linear functional form; Model II utilized a log-linear functional form; and Model III utilized a linear functional form with real price as the dependent variable. The results of Model I were used in the final analysis. It was found that size, grade, storage, and seasonality had consistent relationships to the price of an apple. The findings are applied to the Arizona apple industry.

In the analysis of investment and production decisions for perennial crops, expectations play a critical role. This thesis studied three hypotheses about price expectations and reviewed five supply response models for perennial crops. An empirical model for the apple industry was developed to test alternative representations of expected prices. The naive and adaptive expectation model performed well with national data, whereas moving averages of price and the adaptive expectations model performed better with Washington data. To improve estimates of supply response for perennial crops, better data are needed to describe new plantings, removals, the age distribution of trees, production costs, and climatic conditions. Rapid technological change in the U.S. apple industry may cause producers to revise the way they form expected prices, encouraging them to use more historical information and paying more attention to projections of future demand. Rational expectations perspectives may become increasingly relevant.