Productivity Of Marginal Lands Research Articles

Land investment regulation and allocative efficiency: evidence from the Chinese manufacturing sector

Abstract This article analyzes the role of production factor land in the production process. Using a novel dataset of 20,205 newly established firms in the Chinese manufacturing sector from 2007 to 2014, our production function estimates suggest the existence of a sizable gap (averaging 50 USD/m2) between the marginal productivity of land and its user cost. Basic economic theory suggests a possible relationship with China’s minimum investment intensity (MII) regulation. An analysis using changes in MII limits over time and the resulting discontinuities at county borders confirms that larger gaps are significantly associated with increases in MII limits. Thus, the results of this study suggest that MII regulation leads to allocative inefficiency of land.

English

Soil salinization is one of the major constraints in achieving food security and environmental degradation in Ethiopia. Restoration of salt-affected lands into productive lands and protection of newly developed areas from the spread of salinity is therefore of paramount importance. In high salinity areas where technical solutions to soil rehabilitation are expensive and time consuming and growth of normal field crops is restricted, use of bioremediation methods including planting halophytic forages could bring these soils back into production. This paper identifies different causes of salinity and characterizes soils based on severity of salinity levels. The paper suggests that biosaline agriculture is an economical and effective approach to use unproductive lands for growing different food and fodder crops in Ethiopia. This approach, if prudently adapted, can help in improving livelihood of rural and pastoral communities of the salt-affected areas by enhancing feed and fodder production. The paper has recommended many unexplored and unexploited genetic variation that can be harnessed to improve the salt tolerance of field crop species. Productivity of marginal lands can be maximized for field crops and fodder species and varieties that can tolerate soil salinization and poor irrigation water quality. Key words: Soil salinity, halophytes, biosaline agriculture, food security, salt-tolerance, marginal lands.

An analysis of the productivity and technical efficiency of smallholder irrigation in Ethiopia

Agriculture is the mainstay of Ethiopia’s economy, contributing more than 40% to GDP and providing a livelihood to about 80% of the population. Agriculture is dominated by smallholders growing predominantly rainfed cereals, making economic performance dependent on rainfall availability. This study used the stochastic frontier production function to analyse the productivity and technical efficiency of 4 different agricultural production systems in Ethiopia; namely, irrigated seasonal farms on traditional irrigation systems, irrigated seasonal farms on modern communal irrigation systems, rainfed seasonal farms for farmers who have access to irrigation and rainfed seasonal farms for farmers who do not have access to irrigation. Simple random samples of farmers were selected from lists of farmers. The sample of farmers constituted 122 from the traditional irrigated sites, 281 from the modern communal irrigated sites and 350 from the control rainfed sites of farmers without access to irrigation. For those farmers, from both traditional and modern communal irrigation, who also had access to rainfed farms, their rainfed farms were included in the sample of rainfed with access to irrigation. This sample constituted 434 farmers. The marginal productivity of land on modern communal irrigation systems shows that this is the smallholder irrigation option that should be developed by the Government of Ethiopia. However, the marginal productivity of land in the ‘rainfed without access to irrigation’ category is higher than that of the traditional irrigated system. Thus additional developed land should be put under ‘rainfed without access to irrigation’ before it is put under traditional irrigation; otherwise it should be developed into modern communal irrigation. The average technical efficiency for the modern irrigated system was estimated to be about 71%, whereas this was estimated to be 78% for the ‘rainfed without access to irrigation’ system. There are potential gains to be realised in improving efficiency in these two systems.Keywords: Ethiopia, irrigation, productivity, technical efficiency

High C/N materials mixed with cattle manure as organic amendments to improve soil productivity and nutrient availability

Identification of organic materials, which can enrich the soil organic matter pool and improve the productivity of marginal lands, is a necessity in tropical countries. A study was conducted to comprehend the effect of organic materials of different quality on the soil carbon (C) pool size and N, P, K release from soil. Organic amendments (OA) with different complexities namely, cattle manure (CM), cattle manure-rice straw (CR), cattle manure-wood shavings (CW), and cattle manure-rice straw-wood shavings (CRW) mixtures as fresh (f) or incubated for two months (i), were used in a leaching column study, soil incubation experiment and greenhouse experiment using maize (Zea mays L.) as the test plant. The N, P and K release pattern from soil, soil organic matter content and biomass of maize in OA added soils compared to fertilizer-only (SF) and soil-only (S) treatments were determined. The nitrogen release and microbial activity were higher in fresh-OA added soils compared to other treatments. Phosphorous and K were higher in soils amended with incubated-OA than fresh-OA. The highest N, P and K release was obtained with CM-i, CRWi and CM-f, respectively. Shoot biomass of maize was enhanced by 20-40% with the application of incubated-OA compared to SF. The total soil organic C and active organic C ranged from 10.85 to 13.50 g/kg and 0.31 to 0.64 g/kg, respectively, with soils treated with OA showing significantly high values compared to the control. The organic amendments used as fresh or incubated materials, did not impede plant growth and generally maintained or improved the soil nutrient status and C pool. Incubating OA prior to application improved the nutrient availability in soil. Tropical Agricultural Research Vol. 25 (2): 201 – 213 (2014)

Characteristics of Soils in the Marginal Uplands of Inopacan, Leyte

Improving the productivity of marginal lands greatly depends on good understanding of the characteristics of the soils. Published data on the nature and characteristics of soils in marginal uplands are still limited. This study was conducted to determine the morphological and physicochemical characteristics of soils in the marginal upland of Inopacan, Leyte. Five representative soil profiles located in different physiographic positions were examined and sampled. Results showed that the soils were derived from volcanic materials particularly andesite and basalt rocks. Well-developed soils were found on the summit position with the horizon sequence of Ap-Bt-BC while poorly developed soils occurred on the lower slope positions having Ap-AB-Bw-BC horizon sequence. Soils were found to be highly acidic with soil pH close to 5.0. Soil organic matter, total nitrogen and available P were low and decrease with soil depth. Exchangeable bases (Ca, Mg, K and Na) were high in most soil profiles. The results indicate that N and P fertilization as well as organic matter addition are crucial to increasing the productivity of the marginal upland soils. The marginal nature of the soils is the result of decades of unsustainable cultivation practices.

Productivity Trend in Korea from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Century: A Comment on Jun, Lewis, and Kang

In a recent article published in this Journal, Jun Seong Ho, James Lewis, and Kang Han-Rog described the seve teenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth c nturies in the Korean economic history as periods of expansion, stability, and decline, respectively. Without clarifying whether it is the aggregate or per capita output that they claim to have expanded, stabilized, and then declined, the authors further argued that the trend is explicable in terms of productivity, which was in turn attributed primarily to policy measures affecting irrigation, security of property rights, and famine relief.1 Productivity remains a term imprecisely defined in the article. In the article, Jun, Lewis, and Kang spend no time discussing evidence on factor and asset prices. Such data is readily available. In fact, the authors have published such series themselves.2 The evidence on factor and asset prices indicate that the marginal productivity of land and labor declined consistently, rather than expanded, stabilized, and then declined in the precolonial centuries. Jun, Lewis, and Kang inferred productivity trends from the movement in commodity prices. Having claimed that the relative price of cotton cloth declined from the mid eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, they interpreted the alleged decline as an indication of falling productivity in rice farming. Of the eleven observations on the relative price in the two centuries in Figure 1 (on p. 254), the last three appear to have been made after 1876, the year when cotton textile imports from Britain began to depress cotton textile prices in Korea. The remaining eight?five for the eighteenth century and three for the nineteenth century?data points hardly justify the claim of rice having risen vis-a-vis cotton cloth after 1800. Moreover, even if one chooses to believe so, the perception could equally be interpreted as showing faster productivity growth in cotton textile production. The other evidence presented to support the claim of falling productivity is the rise in the rice price in terms of copper coin in the second half of the nineteenth century (figure on p. 255). However, in all likelihood, the inflation from 1876 onward was a consequence of the opening of port in 1876. In the following decades, agricultural exports expanded rapidly, causing not only the rice price, but also prices of dry field products to surge. The figure also shows that the rice price in terms of silver did not start to rise until 1876, which suggests that the rice price inflation in the third quarter

Stability or Decline? Demand or Supply?

a period of expansion in seventeenth century, stability in eighteenth century, and decline in nineteenth century. Professor Myung Soo Cha asks us to clarify whether expanding, stable, and declining output is aggregate or per output and to define productivity. Reliable figures on input and output for pre-twentieth-century Korea (the primal approach) are still difficult to ascertain and generally unreliable (as acknowledged by Professor Cha). Difficulty and unreliability make a simple calculation of aggregate output still in future. Turning to per output, K. J. Park and D. H. Yang heroically tried to assess tilled acreage per capita from seventeenth to nineteenth centuries using government censuses (which they corroborated with household registers and found generally reflective of trend) and government land surveys for taxation. They conclude, however, that a simple division of acreage by populace tells us very little unless we also consider double-cropping and nonagricultural rural employment.1 Because primal approach is not yet possible,2 Professor Cha suggests that we use dual approach, which we have already done elsewhere,3 and which he acknowledges. He criticizes us for not repeating that approach in this journal and offers data using dual approach to argue that, contrary to our argument, productivity declined from seventeenth century onwards. Rather than repeat ourselves, we attempted another approach to assess productivity by looking for trends in prices. Professor Cha questions whether it is possible to infer productivity from prices, and takes issue with factor and asset prices we published elsewhere. He argues: the evidence on factor and asset prices indicate that marginal productivity of land and labor declined consistently, rather than expanded, stabilized, and then declined in pre colonial centuries. We will take these points in turn. Productivity Glimpsed Through Commodity Prices

Study on Dynamic Mechanism of Urban Expansion: A Case Study of Shandong Province

Abstract This paper aims at studying the dynamic mechanism of urban expansion and its role. Based on the economic model of urban spatial structure and applying panel data in Shandong Province, the paper concludes. Economic growth and transition of economic structure have played the most powerful role in urban expansion. An increase in population helps the core to extend. Increasing agricultural productivity can provide a countervailing force. An increase in transportation costs will limit urban expansion. An increase in the marginal productivity of land in housing production will increase urban expansion. Fiscal and taxation policies also have encouraged the extensive shift of cultivated land into build-up area. This paper also suggests that if high rate increasing GDP is needed, the urban core will continue to expand. The government should take measures to improve the rapid growth of the city.

Producing a Modern Agricultural Frontier: Firms and Cooperatives in Eastern Mato Grosso, Brazil

In economic geography, explanations of emerging agricultural frontier regions are dominated by two theoretical perspectives: land-rent theory and political economy. This article advances current research by applying concepts from new institutional economics to reconcile these models. Drawing from a case of frontier expansion in eastern Mato Grosso state, I focus the debate on an institutional perspective. Two organizations, a colonization firm and an agricultural cooperative, are examined. The combined activities of cooperatives and firms reduced the overall costs of production in regions that are defined by high transactions costs (for example, land-tenure insecurity, poor links to the market, and imperfect information) and risk. Each organization linked individual farmers to necessary resources for commercial farming (for instance, land, capital, technology, and markets) and provided an organizational context for farmers to respond to land-tenure conflict and land degradation. The consequence was an increase in the marginal productivity of land, which translated into an expanded commercial agricultural frontier.

Estimating the Impact of Alkali Bees on the Yield and Acreage of Alfalfa Seed

The role of solitary alkali bees (Nomia melanderi) in the production of alfalfa (Medicago saliva L.) seed in a central California water district is examined empirically. The yield and acreage of alfalfa seed increased rapidly in the district when alkali bees were adopted by a set of innovative farmers during the 1960s. By 1969, farmers in the district had installed more than 100 000 sq ft of artificial bee beds. The alkali bees were destroyed unexpectedly in the early 1970s, leading to a rapid decline in alfalfa seed acres and yields. An estimated production function describes the marginal productivity of the alkali bees and the impact of alkali bees on the marginal productivity of land (...)

LABOUR MARKET DUALISM, THREAT OF EVICTION AND CROPSHARE TENANCY

Landlords in some countries commonly adopt a policy of short-term leasing such that their tenants perpetually face a threat of termination of the contracts if their performance is not satisfactory. By explicitly modelling the threat of termination in a multi-period framework, this paper demonstrates that: (a) a landlord may prefer a landed rather than a landless tenant, (b) although tenants are free to choose the amount of land for cropsharing, the marginal product of land is not driven down to zero, and (c) the efficiency of cropshare cultivation may not be ranked unambiguously against owner or wage cultivation.

The Optimal Quantity of Land in Agriculture

In 1952, when T. W. Schultz declared that land had lost its place as a unique factor of production, he was certainly right about U.S. agriculture. For the almost four decades since Schultz's prophetic analysis, output of U.S. agriculture has increased steadily while the exploited land base has slightly decreased. Land has not proved a constraint to production. Many varieties of technical change have kept the marginal product of land from falling, despite its increasingly intensive use.

Tenure Systems in Traditional China

I. A General Equilibrium Model of Tenure Preference Classical marginalists, at least after John Clark, provide an unequivocal solution for the conventional factor market where people sell the productive services of their resources to producers. The productexhaustion theorem says that if factors are priced according to their marginal products, incomes of all resource owners will exactly exhaust the value of total products in the long-run competitive equilibrium. This holds true regardless of which factor is variable and which is fixed, and regardless of which group of resource owners perform as producers who buy productive services of other resources in the market and claim residuals for themselves. In an agrarian economy with land and labor as the inputs, a land owner may cultivate his land and purchase the labor input from outside, paying a wage rate in accordance with labor's marginal product. The land owner is then the residual claimant. Alternatively, he may lease out his land and receive a fixed rental rate per unit of area equal to the marginal product of land. In this case the tenant is the producer and claims the residual. Income distribution between the two parties remains the same under each land arrangement. Wage and rent are, therefore, identical conceptually. The classical marginal analysis has not presented a satisfactory theory of share tenancy, which, instead of being a seller-buyer transaction in a conventional factor market, is essentially a partnership arrangement between two persons who own complementary factors (hence, the term land renting will hereafter denote the fixed-rent system exclusively). In fact, the direct application of marginal analysis to share tenancy has created considerable confusion in early economic literature. Only recently some general equilibrium models of land tenure systems have been developed for better understanding of the

Collectivization of Chinese agricultural production, 1952–1957: A land-saving organizational change

This paper applies an aggregate agricultural production function in the analysis of the change in grain production in China in 1952–1957. It shows that in that period of radical institutional transformation the marginal rate of substitution of land for labor rose sharply. Its economic effect can be understood as a land-saving organizational change with consequences similar to a disembodied land-saving technical change: rapid decline in the marginal product of land, attributed to a slow pace of increase in complementary inputs and rapid intensification of farming; and a steep rise in the marginal product of labor, directly related to its better utilization.

Agricultural Land Price and Agricultural Technological Progress

This paper includes the concepts of land rent from the standpoint of modern economics and accounts for the contributing factors in the formation of the agricultural land price during the pre-war and the post-war periods. It can be said the agricultural land price in the later Taisho period was conditioned by farm rent and as far as the pure farming region is concerned, the agricultural land price in the post-war period is also explained considerably by net returns per 10 ares of land, which is capitalized by an 8 percent interest rate. Furthermore, the increase in agricultural land price, based on the premises of constant return to scale and the supported price of farm products, has demonstrated that the rise in the agricultural land price is sufficiently explained by technological progress in rice production. Though various factors are considered important in the contribution to the formation of the agricultural land price in this paper the main emphasis is based upon the fact that the interior factors of agriculture considerably elucidate its formation throughout the pre-war and the post-war period. This is especially applicable to the agricultural land price in pure farming regions. I. LAND RENT In agriculture, land is the most important production factor. There are different viewpoints among Marxian, classical, and modern economists. Among Marxian economics and classical economics, land rent is considered to be derived from surplus, whereas the generally accepted idea among modern economists is that it is determined by marginal productivity of land. However, modern economists do not necessarily have a unified viewpoint on land rent. It is true that certain famous modern economists maintain that the essence of land rent is surplus. For example, Marshall (1922) is one among them. According to his opinion that the essence of land rent was surplus and he introduced the concept of quasi-rent which could be extensively applied to fixed capital exclusive of land. Likewise, Robinson (1964) asserted that the essence of the concept of land rent was surplus. Consequently surplus had to exceed the minimum income which was necessary for the operation of production factors and was obtained by a particular part of the production factors. However, these two different views on land rent among modern economists do not necessarily differ from each other completely, since the marginal productivity of land and surplus will be, in essence, equal as long as land is looked

Optimization of stand treatment based on the marginal productivity of land and growing stock

Optimization of stand treatment based on the marginal productivity of land and growing stock