With the renewal of interest in agriculture in developing countries during the sixties, there has been much concern with the policy instruments to stimulate output without penalizing the urban consumer. Many countries have utilized the rationing of subsidized inputs such as credit for this purpose. In the seventies, international donors-such as the World Bank and USAID-began pressing developing countries to aim more of their agricultural development programs at small farmers. One response has been to extend the use of a major instrument variable, credit policy, to small farmers. However, small farmers often use very few cash inputs; hence, the effectiveness of this instrument may be low unless combined with others.A second instrument to increase small farmer incomes is the development of new agricultural technology. Besides the developmental costs of the new technology, recent literature has implied that risk aversion may impede its adoption (Benito, Brink and McCarl, Sanders and Hollanda, Schulter and Mount, Wiens, Wolgin). Econometric analysis of this risk-aversion characteristic has not yet clearly indicated instrument variables to reduce it (Dillon and Scandizzo; Binswanger; Moscardi and de Janvry).Farmers also will have difficulty subjectively estimating the distribution of returns from new alternatives. The desired information would be this distribution over all possible states of nature, which is unlikely to be available to the farmer presented with an adoption choice. Policies to improve risk perception, such as farm level experiments of new technology, are another type of instrument variable to influence adoption.

Background: The early stages of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic left many hospital systems devoid of personal protective equipment. Community-driven groups manufactured Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as a form of temporary replacement until supply could increase to frontline healthcare workers. The purpose of this study was to survey hospital systems in Alabama and Mississippi who requested and received PPE to determine recipient opinions concerning community involvement.Methods: A 15-question Qualtrics survey was distributed to hospital systems who requested and received community-generated PPE (CGPPE) from the group known as Alabama Fighting COVID. 275 responses were gathered over a period of 6 months.Results: Survey data showed that most respondents from healthcare and healthcare-associated professions responded that wearing community generated personal protective equipment provided them with the perception of added protection (55.31% of participants selected either “Agree” or “Strongly Agree”), and that it improved their outlook and desire to work during the pandemic (51.77% of participants selected either “Agree” or “Strongly Agree”).Conclusions: Most respondents reported that wearing community generated personal protective equipment not only provided them with the perception of added protection, but that it improved their outlook and desire to work during the pandemic. With these responses in mind, our study raises questions concerning whether local CGPPE distribution could improve well-ness outcomes of healthcare workers (HCWs) not only in relation to decreased viral transmission, but also in favorable psychosocial health assessments. Further implications for research concerning community involvement during future medical crises are indicated, especially with the current rise of the delta variant strain.

In a classical article in 1959, Ragnar Frisch [8] developed a procedure, which, under the assumption of want independence1 and given commodity budget shares, income elasticities, and one own‐price elasticity, allows one to calculate a complete matrix of own and cross price elasticities. Between broad commodity groups such an assumption (want independence) has becme increasingly accepted and in fact under the label of separability has formed the basis for a family of demand models that are increasingly used to estimate demand elasticities for broad commodity groups (the linear expenditure system, the Rotterdam model, etc.). At the individual commodity level however, the assumption of want independence seems less viable, e.g., the utility one derives from pork is in general not considered independent from one's consumption of beef. However, it has become increasingly common (and apparently acceptable) to find the Frisch methodology utilized to develop demand price elasticity estimates for individual agricultural commodities [4, 7, 17].

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