In the early 1980s, a paradigm shift occurred in the field of food security, following Amartya Sens (1981) claims that food insecurity is more of a demand concern, affecting the poor's access to food, than a supply concern, affecting availability of food at the national level. Despite the wide acceptance of Sen's thinking, many controversies including the relative importance of supply-side versus demand-side variables in causing and solving food insecurity have remained in academic and policy circles. This study develops a recursive household food security model within the framework of consumer demand and production theories following Singh et al. (1986), and parses out the relative importance of supply-side versus demand-side variables in determining household food security in southern Ethiopia. Based on results of a test of full/reduced model and the magnitude of changes in conditional probabilities of food security, we conclude that the supply-side variables are more powerful determinants of food security than the demand-side variables. Copyright 2005 International Association of Agricultural Economics.

A model is developed to explain full-empty movement decisions for motor carriers. The model is estimated for movements to Florida of carriers serving the Florida produce/ornamentals industry. The results indicate that carriers act rationally, basing their decisions on a wide range of factors. The findings also suggest that regulatory restrictions continue to result in unnecessary empty movements.Transportation rates playa crucial role in the determination of economic activity over time and space. Despite this fact, relatively little attention has been devoted to understanding transportation markets. Indeed, it is common in interregional trade modeling to treat transportation supply as perfectly elastic. This tangential treatment of transportation markets has been identified as a major reason for the failure of many, if not most, interregional trade models to reflect adequately the economic activity being depicted (Johnson, p. 63). This article describes a study which focuses on understanding one aspect of these markets: the determinants of full/empty movement decisions. The results help to explain seasonal swings in rate levels, why some rates taper (i.e., increase at a decreasing rate) with distance, the impact of regulatory controls, and the role of expectations in carrier decision making.It is recognized that jointness in the production of transportation services favors full movements. If a vehicle goes from point ito pointj, the marginal cost of obtaining and carrying a load is the cost of search, pickup, and delivery, and the increment in fuel and labor costs over those for running empty (Mohring,. This increment is generally small when compared to total running costs. ThereRichard Beilock and Richard L. Kilmer are an assistant professor and an associate professor, respectively, Food and Resource Economics Department, University of Florida. Authors are listed in alphabetical order; senior authorship is not assigned. This is Florida Agricultural Experiment Station Journal Series No. 6483.Review was coordinated by Peter Heimberger, associate editor.fore, a large share of the transportation costs becomes a fixed cost which does not influence the carrier's full-empty movement decision process (Jara-Diaz). Despite this inducement to avoid empty movements, considerable empty movements are still observed. The Interstate Commerce Commission (lCC) found that over 20% of refrigerated trailers on interstate highways were empty (ICC, p. 12), and the estimates for specialized equipment (e.g., tank truck and bulk goods carriers) ranged as high as 40%. Empty mileage may result from restrictions in the regulatory system, be unavoidable due to freight imbalances between regions, or simply reflect carriers foregoing loads to maximize returns at another location (Paxson, Miller, and Basemann and Daugherty). However, there has been little empirical work to quantify the importance of these factors. In this article, a model is developed to explain full-empty movement decisions of motor carriers. The empirical estimation of the m...

No abstract

No abstract

As a result of economies of size, food processors are generally large and few in number. These characteristics put processors at a bargaining advantage over independent farmers. Marketing cooperatives were established to counter the uneven bargaining position of individual farmers. This article investigates the relative bargaining strength of one milk marketing cooperative and several fluid milk processors. The Nash bargaining model can be used to analyze the negotiated price in the Florida fluid milk market which acts like a bilateral monopoly. The milk marketing cooperatives have bargained well with the milk marketing processors. The monthly bargaining strength of the Southeast Dairy Cooperative, Inc. (SDC), exceeds the monthly bargaining strength of the processors in all twelve months, ranging from a low of 0.6664 in January to a high of 0.7831 in September. The monthly average bargaining strength across all months for SDC is 0.7326.