Lewell F. Gunter

Foreign Aid and the Quest for Poverty Reduction: Is Aid to Agriculture Effective?

Development statistics estimate that three quarters of the poor live in rural areas and most of them depend on agriculture and related activities for their livelihood. Consequently, research focusing on economic growth and poverty reduction has found that sustainable rapid transition out of poverty requires a special emphasis on the agricultural sector. This study contributes to the debate on aid effectiveness by disaggregating total aid into subcategories and specifically investigating the relationship between aid given to the agricultural sector and poverty reduction. If agricultural development is more effective in reducing poverty than some other types of development, then foreign aid directed towards agriculture may be more efficient in increasing the well-being of the poor than aid directed to some other sectors or uses. Our analysis uses panel data for developing aid recipient countries to empirically test this relationship. We find a significant relationship between agricultural aid and poverty reduction in our estimates.

Multiple Policy Goals in a Trade Model with Explicit Factor Markets

As trade protectionism has been reduced through multilateral agreements, concerns have been raised about competitiveness effects of cross-country differences in environmental and labor standards. Costs associated with decreased competitiveness are distributed across consumers and the various providers of inputs used in the production of affected commodities. In this paper we present a trade model which can be used to help quantify the magnitude and distribution of costs associated with changes in input regulations. The model can also be used to identify levels of policies required to offset or redistribute costs associated with regulations which reduce international competitiveness. Copyright 1996, Oxford University Press.

Development Aid to Agriculture and Economic Growth

The link between foreign aid and economic growth has been a controversial issue with no strong consensus so far. This paper argues that a possible reason why some studies may conclude that aid is ineffective in promoting economic growth might be that not all aid is given for development purposes (i.e. aid given for strategic considerations, humanitarian reasons or emergency relief). This study classifies foreign aid into four subcategories: agricultural aid, social infrastructure aid, investment aid, and non‐investment aid. Using the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique on a Barro type growth regression with panel data from the aid recipient economies, this paper finds that when aid is directed to the agricultural sector of the developing countries, it is positively and significantly related to growth and can affect economic growth in the short run.

Financing the disposal of unwanted agricultural pesticides

Abstract Since the mid 1980s, it has been recognized that significant quantities of unwanted pesticides are being retained by agricultural producers in barns and other storage buildings throughout the United States. U.S. state governments have responded to the hazards posed by these pesticides by implementing programs to collect and dispose of them. This paper reviews issues related to costs and funding of pesticide collection and disposal programs. Primary and secondary information is presented on approaches of U.S. states to, and experiences with, unwanted pesticide removal. Differences in the theoretical impacts of various collection funding methods on reducing unwanted pesticide stocks, and the allocation of disposal costs are discussed. A permanent funding source, acceptance of pesticides from all small business firms, and the coordination of pesticide collections with household hazardous waste programs offer suggestions for developing an effective response to this latent environmental hazard.

Wage Determination for Regular Hired Farm Workers: An Empirical Analysis for Georgia

Regular hired farm workers, performing 150 days or more of farm work annually, became increasingly important in the 1970s. The number of regular hired workers in the United States increased by almost 50 percent during the decade, while the number of seasonal workers, operators, and unpaid family workers declined. Pricing of regular hired labor is investigated through estimation of three nested wage determination models in a case study analysis for Georgia. Micro-level data on individual workers were used to analyze the effects of general human capital, farm worker duties, local labor market conditions, and farm characteristics on wage rates.

Dynamic labour demand schedules for US agriculture

Labour in US agriculture is performed by diverse workers including farm operators, unpaid family workers, and hired workers who work anywhere from a few days per year to the entire year. Agricultural labour literature has drawn distinctions between these different types of workers but these distinctions are frequently ignored in input demand studies. In recent studies seasonal and full-time hired labour are invariably treated as a single input, and hired labour is frequently aggregated with family/operator labour. This study maintains seasonal hired labour, full-time hired labour and family/operator labour as three separate inputs and evaluates input substitutability and technical change in a dynamic framework. Empirical evidence of differences in demand characteristics for the three types of workers is presented.

Forecasting Irrigation Water Demand: A Case Study on the Flint River Basin in Georgia

Southeast drought conditions have accentuated the demand for irrigation in the face of restricted water supply. For allocating this supply, Georgia held an auction for withdrawing irrigated acreage. This auction withdrew 33,000 acres from irrigation, resulting in a physical estimate of a 399 acre-feet daily increase in water flow. The actual reduction is driven by crop distributional changes on the basis of economic substitution and expansion effects. In contrast to the physical estimates, an econometric model that considers these effects is developed. The differences between the physical and econometric models result in an increase in the estimate of water savings of around 19% to 24%.

U.S. Market Share for Poultry Meat in Russia: Trade Policy and Exchange Rate Effects

Abstract This study examines changes in U.S. market shares for poultry meat in Russia after the ruble devaluation of August 1998. In the 1990s, the U.S. captured over 90% of the Russian market for poultry meat imports. Russia accounted for a large segment of U.S. poultry meat exports, about 40%-55%, of dark meat sales in particular. The ruble devaluation drastically reduced leg quarter exports from the U.S. to Russia. Moreover, the U.S. lost 9% of its market share after the economic crisis while Brazilian, Dutch and German exporters captured market shares. Nevertheless, the market for U.S. broiler meat remains strong in Russia.

A decomposition approach to analysing racial and gender biases in Farm Service Agency's lending decisions

This study provides a different perspective in revisiting the racial and gender discrimination issue at the Farm Service Agency (FSA). Employing the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition method, this study analyses disparities in approved loan amounts among racial and gender classes of borrowers. This studys results indicate substantial differentials in approved loan amount gaps between racial and gender classes, favouring white and female borrowers, respectively. Further scrutiny of the borrowers’ comparative financial conditions presented to FSA to support their loan applications, however, indicate that these borrower groups significantly dominate their peers in a number of measures that indicate their financial strengths and relatively greater capability to repay their future lending obligations. Hence, this studys results can hardly be construed as evidence of biased lending decisions as these borrower groups should rightfully be offered more favourable loan terms, such as larger loan amounts, by the FSA.

Computerization in the US ornamental nursery industry

This research analyzes the determinants of computer application adoption by US nurseries. A loglinear model, commonly used for the analysis of contingency tables, was adapted to the problem. This approach allowed the computer adoption and application adoption decisions to be considered together, and permitted the modeling of the effect of adopting a given computerized application on the probability of adopting another. The effects of firm size, age, retail sales percentage, and the number of permanent employees on the computerization of accounting, word processing, inventory, and marketing are analyzed.