Dale M. Hoover

Commuting, Migration, and Rural-Urban Population Dynamics

Over the past 25 years social scientists attempting to explain the dramatic changes in the relative distribution of urban and rural population growth have gravitated toward two competing explanations. The regional restructuring hypothesis holds that changes in the spatial distribution of employment opportunities have been dominant whereas the deconcentration hypothesis attributes these changes to changes in residential preferences of workers and consumers. We develop an empirical test of these two explanations based on whether commuting and migration are positively or negatively related after controlling for other economic factors. Our econometric results support the deconcentration hypothesis.

A Framework for Analyzing Agricultural and Food Policy in the 1980s

In a recent paper my colleague E. C. Pasour presented an incisive review of the effects of recent public policy in agriculture. He noted that there have been large transfers from consumers to producers, that these benefits have tended to be concentrated among farms with larger-than-average sales, that benefits frequently have been capitalized-leaving present farmers with little benefit but vulnerable to losses if the programs are given up, and that deadweight losses occur as farmers use resources trying to capture program rents. He goes further to note that governments activities may be destabilizing rather than stabilizing, and that frequently there will be undesired and unintended secondary effects on the economy. Pasours paper grows out of a policy framework that is familiar to economists: welfare for a given pattern of resource ownership can be maximized by market activity where competition exists. In some but not all cases, imperfect government can improve on imperfect markets; and when undertaken, the direction and costs of income redistribution should be

Inflation, Agriculture, and the Food Economy: Discussion

The topic for this session is so broad and the economic shocks of the past decade have been so numerous it is not surprising that the preceding papers have ranged over a wide territory. The participants have presented a number of intriguing hypotheses and some very interesting facts. I will present a brief overview of inflation taken from the three papers and from my own assessment. Then I will discuss specific issues from each of the papers and raise some questions about inflation not covered here or in the agricultural economics literature.

The Estimation of Cotton Costs in the Southeast

The Agriculture Act of 1964 provided for the must have been that cross-sectional data on costs development of a special cotton research program would be sufficient for the specification of the designed to produce information which could be used geographic or input dimensions of resource to reduce the cost of producing upland cotton in the misallocation. Alternatively, it may have been United States. Authorization of

American farm policy, 1948-1973

10 million annually hypothesized that information about means and for the special program provided for the extensive distributions would in, and of itself, cause firm collection of data and for an annual report to managers to reorganize their operations in such a way congressional committees by the Secretary of that costs would be reduced. Information is a special Agriculture on the progress of the program. Field kind of resource and its acquisition and use is of surveys have been conducted for the 1964, 1965, concern to extension workers and other adult 1966 and 1969 crop years on about 5,000 cotton educators. Nevertheless it seems likely that the farms across all production regions in the United primary purpose behind the collection of the cotton States. cost data was to permit the specification of cost and By presenting regional and national aggregates of production functions useful in identifying resource input costs per pound, the Economic Research allocation problems. Service (ERS) has provided a focus for research Data needed to estimate mean costs for three designed to increase cotton production efficiency sizes of farms in each of 18 areas would be of little [8]. The published reports summarize the data in use if they gave no hint of the structure of costs as a terms of total and direct costs per pound of lint, function of size or of optimal resource mix for acreage harvested and yields per harvested acre. individual farms. In our earlier work [6] we used the Distributions of the percent of cotton which is data to estimate returns to size and to estimate produced below specified cost per pound levels are production elasticities. While our work departs from given by regions with little discussion of the the calculation of means which appears in the implications. preliminary analysis [8], it fits within the structure It is our contention in this paper that the data and purpose of cost of production analysis. This used without great care may produce misinformation, earlier work directed our attention to two major First, the purposes originally specified for the data problems that we wish to discuss: (1) the erratic are reviewed briefly. Next, alternative methods of effects of weather and pests on costs and profits, and using the data are reviewed. The paper closes with (2) systematic errors in reporting fixed factors such as recommendations concerning the use of the data in land and human resources. other regions and for other years. ERRATIC EFFECTS IN COST ANALYSIS OBJECTIVES AND MEANS We think it is reasonable to compute some Cost reduction was specified as the major measures of cost and to relate them to volume as objective of the cotton cost surveys [8]. The logic occurred in early data summaries and our own study,