No abstract

This article investigates how off-farm income affects crop output market participation decisions and marketed surplus of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. A double-hurdle model is estimated using three waves of panel data from the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey. Unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for using a correlated random effect procedure and potential endogeneity of explanatory variables using a control function approach. The results show that off-farm income has no significant influence on household crop output market participation. However, conditional on market participation, additional off-farm earnings negatively affect the marketed surplus. This indicates that farmers use off-farm earnings for consumption rather than for investment in agricultural production. Policy measures that promote rural investment may help increase returns to labor for land-poor households participating in off-farm work in the process of agricultural commercialization.JEL classifications: C23, C26, Q12, Q13, Q18

In the area of environmental analysis using hedonic price models, we investigate the performance of various nonparametric and semiparametric specifications. The proposed model specifications are made up of two parts: a linear component for house characteristics and a non-(semi)parametric component representing the nonlinear influence of environmental indicators on house prices. We adopt a general-to-specific search procedure, based on recent specification tests comparing the proposed specifications with a fully nonparametric benchmark model, to select the best model specification. An application of these semiparametric models to rural districts indicates that pollution resulting from intensive livestock farming has a significant nonlinear impact on house prices. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The continuing process of global integration bears implications for farmers and related supplying and processing industries in all parts of the world, but also for the rest of the world economy. An assessment of agricultural and trade policy impacts is bound to be complex and is often supported by quantitative modeling analysis. This article provides an assessment of the present state of applied modelling in the area of trade and agricultural policies. We provide in this paper a comparative assessment of alternative modelling approaches, considering a total of 16 partial equilibrium and general equilibrium models. The assessment includes theoretical modelling foundations, datasets employed and institutional aspects, such as model maintenance and dissemination of results. A typology of models is provided by structuring the assessment along a clear set of evaluation criteria. 0 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (Y. Surry). 0169-5150/01/$ -see front matter 0 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PII: S 0 1 6 9 -5 1 5 0 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 1 0 9 -2 Table 1

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives| 4.0 International License