Cephas B. Naanwaab

Evaluation of consumers’ perception and willingness to pay for bacteriophage treated fresh produce

Food-borne illnesses caused by bacteria such as enterohemorrhagic E. coli and Salmonella spp. take a significant toll on American consumers’ health; they also cost the United States an estimated

Demand for Fresh Vegetables in the United States: 1970–2010

77.7 billion annually in health care and other losses.1 One novel modality for improving the safety of foods is application of lytic bacteriophages directly onto foods, in order to reduce or eliminate their contamination with specific foodborne bacterial pathogens. The main objective of this study was to assess consumers’ perception about foods treated with bacteriophages and examine their willingness to pay (WTP) an additional amount (10–30 cents/lb) for bacteriophage-treated fresh produce. The study utilized a survey questionnaire administered by telephone to consumers in 4 different states: Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The results show that consumers are in general willing to pay extra for bacteriophage-treated fresh produce if it improves their food safety. However, income, race, and the state where a consumer lives are significant determinants in their WTP.

Does Economic Freedom Promote Human Development? New Evidence from a Cross-National Study

This paper analyzes a demand system for eight major fresh vegetables in the USA using the most recently available dataset (1970–2010). A first-differenced Linear Approximate Almost Ideal Demand System (LA-AIDS) is applied to estimate price and expenditure elasticity of demand, imposing homogeneity and symmetry restrictions. We find that not only are consumers responsive to changes in own-prices but they also respond significantly to changes in prices of other fresh vegetables that are consumed together. Conditional budget share allocation to lettuce, cabbage, and celery has declined, while the share of the consumer dollar going to tomatoes, peppers, and onions has increased over the period. Except for cabbage, all own-price elasticity estimates are negative, less than unity in absolute value, and statistically significant. About half of the 56 cross-price elasticities are negative and significant, indicating high, albeit asymmetric, complementarities among these fresh vegetables. Expenditure elasticities are positive and significant for all but one of these eight vegetables. Over the period under consideration, demand and expenditure elasticities remained fairly stable.

Analyzing Trade Growth Effects of Deviations from Long-run Economic Growth

ABSTRACT:Previous studies of the relationship between economic freedom and human development have generally used either life expectancy, literacy rates, or subjective well-being as indicators of human development. These indicators tend to measure only some aspect of human development, ignoring other important attributes. For example, life expectancy alone is not an adequate indicator because a long life plagued by disease, malnutrition, and poverty does not constitute human development. To overcome these shortcomings the present paper uses an all-encompassing measure—the human development index—and two other less commonly used indicators: infant and maternal mortality rates. Thus, the paper analyzes the effect of economic freedom on these three indicators of human development in a sample of 88 countries. The paper uses economic freedom index constructed by the Fraser Institute and Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Conditional Quantile regression method is used to address the differential impacts of economic freedom across the distribution of human development. The results show that the effect of economic freedom varies across quantiles of the human development index, infant mortality, and maternal mortality. At lower quantiles of infant mortality the effect is small (-3.72 at the 0.10 quantile) and larger at the upper quantiles (-8.88 at the 0.90 quantile). To put these effects into perspective, for every country whose infant mortality rate is at the 10th percentile, a unit increase on its economic freedom index can be expected to reduce infant mortality by 3.7 deaths per 1,000 live births. For countries at the 90th percentile of infant mortality, it would reduce by 8.9 deaths per 1,000 live births. Concerning maternal mortality, the effect also varies across the quantiles from -6.59 at the 10th quantile to -36.55 at the 90th quantile. Thus, at the 10th percentile, a one-unit increase on the economic freedom index would only reduce maternal mortality by roughly 6.5 deaths per 100, 000 live births, while at the 90th percentile it would reduce maternal mortality by 36.5 per 100, 000 live births. At lower quantiles of the HDI distribution, economic freedom tends to have a pronounced effect and then levels off from the middle to upper quantiles. The opposite is true for infant and maternal mortality rates. The policy implication of these findings is that countries that have the least human development have the most to gain from improvement in economic freedom.

Economic freedom, human capital, and foreign direct investment

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between trade growth and long-run trends in real GDP growth from a purely empirical perspective. Its novelty lies in the way that it models trade growth: as a function of cyclical trends in real GDP growth. The main finding is that trade growth responds asymmetrically to deviations from long-run GDP growth. Generally, trade growth is positive and statistically significant when GDP growth is above the long-run trend. On the other hand, trade growth ceases but does not become negative when GDP growth falls below its long-run trend. While this behavior holds true broadly, individual countries’ trade growth may respond differently when GDP growth is above or below trend. Comparatively, low-income countries’ trade growth takes the greatest hit when economic growth slows, while lower-middle and high-income countries are least affected. These findings have potential implications for trade policy-making in the twenty-first Century especially given the current atmosphere of anti-globalization and slow trade growth.

Determinants of productivity in Africa: The role of economic freedom

This paper investigates the impact of economic freedom and human capital on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in a large panel dataset of 137 developing and developed countries covering the period of 1995-2010. Foreign direct investment is by far the largest source of private capital flows to developing and middle income countries, far exceeding other private capital flows such as portfolio investment and remittances. Many of these countries have been liberalizing their policies in recent decades to attract more foreign direct investment. The ultimate goal of attracting more foreign direct investment is to augment limited domestic investment and spur economic growth through transfer of knowledge, technology, and managerial skills. The role of traditional determinants of FDI such as availability of natural resources, market size, and cheap labor are well researched in the literature. What has not received much attention is the impact of non-traditional determinants of FDI flows like the presence of economic freedom and high skilled labor in the recipient countries. Besides, there has not been any attempt to simultaneously model the impacts of economic freedom and human capital as well as their interaction on foreign direct investment inflows, a crucial void which this paper fills. In order to deal with potential endogeneity problem in the explanatory variables and unobserved country fixed-effects, we use dynamic panel data methods. The system generalized method of moments (S-GMM) estimator of Arellano and Bond, and Blundell and Bond are estimated in two-step procedure, using levels of the variables as instruments for the difference equation and differences of the variables as instruments for the levels equation. We test for instrument validity using Sargan’s test and second order autocorrelation AR (2) in the differenced equation. The results show that economic freedom has a positive and significant effect on foreign direct investment in middle- and high-income countries. Human capital is a significant determinant of FDI in all countries. After accounting for endogeneity of and interaction between economic freedom and human capital, we find that the marginal effect of economic freedom on FDI is contingent upon the level of human capital in the recipient country. We postulate that Transnational Corporations (TNCs) care about the quality of human capital only in the case of low-income countries when they make their decisions to locate in developing countries. We do not find this to be the case with respect to TNCs’ decisions to invest in middle-income and high-income countries.

Economic Feasibility of Sustainable High Oilseed-Based Biofuel Production: The Case for Biodiesel in North Carolina

This paper examines the determinants of multifactor productivity in a cross-country study of 33 African countries. Among others, we specifically focus on the role of economic freedom, and its subcomponents, as defined by the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Economic Freedom Index (EFI). The empirical results show that the economic freedom index (and most of its components) has a positive and statistically significant impact on the productivity of African nations. The components of economic freedom that are critically important to enhancing productivity of African countries are: Business freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, property rights freedom and freedom from corruption. We also investigate ‘bivariate granger-causality’ between economic freedom and total productivity. The results show that economic freedom granger-causes total factor productivity in most of these countries, but the other way around is not true.