Over the past two decades the effectiveness of subsidized credit programs in improving the productivity of traditional farmers in developing countries has been extensively debated. This study analyzes the effects of one such program—PRODEMATA—on the technical and allocative efficiency of traditional farmers in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The empirical results suggest that PRODEMATA has had no effect on technical efficiency and a slightly negative effect on allocative efficiency.

Recent patterns of rural land use in Georgia have stressed urban aggrandizement and the transformation of a significant portion of the available rural land into forests. The area covered by commercial forests in Georgia has increased 21 percent over the past quarter century to the point where two out of every three acres in Georgia are presently growing tree crops. During the 1958-68 decade the proportion of land in farms in Georgia fell from 31.3 percent to 27.0 percent, representing a withdrawal of approximately 1.6 million acres from farm use. As a partial consequence of this shift in rural land use patterns, the price of farm land over the past ten years has increased more rapidly in Georgia than in any other state but one.

Property tax systems have undergone rapid change in almost every state during the past few years. Consequently, their distributional impact merits investigation. The incidence of the property tax is at the heart of the distributional question. It is generally felt that land owners bear the full burden of property taxes and that changes in it are capitalized into property values. Usually it is assumed that property taxes are not shifted forward to the consumer, but there has been little empirical verification of this notion. This paper will develop a simple model of the land market to test several alternative hypotheses concerning the incidence of property taxes on agricultural land in the United States.

Persistently high levels of unemployment among unskilled workers, as well as college graduates, have focused attention on manpower problems. High levels of unemployment may result from a deficiency of aggregate demand or from structural maladjustments in the manpower market. The latter problems generally emanate from changing technological patterns and shifts in the pattern of economic growth. While there are many socio-economic issues involved, it is generally recognized that problems of structural adjustment can be satisfactorily managed, in time, if a sufficiently high level of aggregate demand is maintained. Therefore, an initial concern in manpower planning is to accurately relate manpower requirements by occupation and level of education to anticipated levels of aggregate demand.

David Holland has provided a basic contribution to the expanding literature concerned with the distributional effects of expenditures on education. He has ventured into the relatively untouched realm of measuring the distrubutional impact of tax costs and expenditure benefits of public elementary, secondary and higher education. Our fundamental ignorance of the equity issues involved in public education, coupled with the economic and social importance of its eventual product, provide ample justification for continued research in this field.Even though a valuable literature review occupies a significant proportion of Holland's paper, I will limit my comments to that portion of the paper that is original. Reviewing briefly, Holland's goal is to determine the distribution by income class of net benefits resulting from education. To do this, he compares the average per family tax costs for the provision of education with the average per family expenditures made. The difference between the two is the net subsidy received. Holland's basic conclusion is that the net subsidies from lower (as opposed to higher) education are regressive.