SummaryThe importance of forest products to the households who live in or close to the forests has been increasingly recognised over the past ten years. The CGIAR SystemThe Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is an informal association of 41 public and private sector donors that supports a network of sixteen international agricultural research institutes, CIFOR being the newest of these. The Group was established in 1971. The CGIAR Centers are part of a global agricultural research system which endeavour to apply international scientific capacity to solution of the problems of the worldÕs disadvantaged people. CIFORCIFOR was established under the CGIAR system in response to global concerns about the social, environmental and economic consequences of loss and degradation of forests. It operates through a series of highly decentralised partnerships with key institutions and/or individuals throughout the developing and industrialised worlds. The nature and duration of these partnerships are determined by the specific research problems being addressed. This research agenda is under constant review and is subject to change as the partners recognise new opportunities and problems.

This paper formalizes and extends proposals by Sir Richard Stone for adjusting initial unbalanced estimates of the components of a matrix so that they optimally satisfy accounting requirements imposed by tabular form. Stone's proposal, based on linear combinations of initial unbiassed estimates, has many potential applications in national income accounting, input-output construction and demography, amongst other fields. Given that the Stone adjustment procedure simply represents the firstorder conditions resulting from the minimization of a quadratic loss function it is possible, as is done here, to develop alternative procedures for minimizing the constrained loss function. These procedures, based on the conjugate gradient algorithm, prove to be much more efficient than the traditional solution, both in terms of time taken and storage requirements, and the optimal adjustment of very large (say 1,000 x 1,000) social account matrices becomes quite feasible. Some other minor problems are handled which relate to multiple prior estimates of cell members, and cell members for which no prior estimate exists at all. The techniques were applied to a social account matrix constructed for the Muda River district in West Malaysia and, though the results are too detailed to present here, figures are given which indicate the feasibility and usefulness of the methods.

In a recent paper Ashenfelter, Ashmore and Lalonde found they could explain the variation in the price (and quality) of Bordeaux vintages by a combination of age, temperature and rainfall. The same ideas are applied here to Grange Hermitage, Australia's premier wine. Weather variation is less important than in Bordeaux. However, some remarkably robust results are obtained: a ‘quality index’ for Grange is derived, predictions about still unreleased vintages are made, the Australian regression coefficients work well in the Bordeaux equation, and issues relating to market efficiency in the pricing of young wines are examined

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