Private Modes Research Articles

Governing Of Marketing In Bulgarian Farms

Attempt has been made to identify dominant forms and factors for output realization in Bulgarian farms. New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics framework is used to estimate comparative efficiency of various modes for realization of farm outputs in farms of different type (unregistered, cooperative, agro-firms) and various sizes (small, middle-size, large). Study is based on a large-scale microeconomic data collected through interviews with managers of 0.5% of commercial farms in the country. Big institutional, economic, and behavioral uncertainty combined with high assets specificity and low recurrence of transactions, have blocked formation of agrarian markets in the country. Market has failed to organize significant part of inputs supply and outputs realization transactions. However, agrarian agents have developed various private modes to overcome transacting difficulties and to govern their dependent transactions. A great variety of in-farm production and processing, personal contacts, long-term marketing contracts, and interlinked modes etc. have come to existence and they characterize dominant structures for outputs realization in Bulgarian farming today. Major type of farming outputs realization (household consumption and giving to friends and relatives; production in-farm consumption; additional processing in-farm; long-term contract for outside processing; sell) in farms of different types and sizes has been identified and their relative share in brut farm output determined. Product specificity (grain, vegetables, fruits and grape, live animals and meat, milk, others) and its relation to specific organizational choice of outputs realization (member cooperative; other farm, cooperative or firms; retail trade; wholesale trade to store, hotel, restaurant; commodity exchange; wholesale market; in-farm processing; state reserve; direct export) have been identified and microeconomic factors for governance choice discussed. Importance of diverse factors for preferring a particular buyer or mode for realization of farm outputs (lack of alternative buyer; best prices; maximum profit; minimum risk; cheapest way; maximum security; high trust; tradition; frequency of transactions with the same partner) have been specified. Prominence of various transacting problems for realization (lack of buyers; low prices; unstable prices; no price information; no buyer information; buyer is better informed; unreliable partner; not-fulfillment of negotiated terms; controlling and enforcement of contracts; non-business factors etc.) for main farming products and type of farms have been specified. In the same way the significance of chief factors for successful realization (mutual benefits for partners; written contract; oral agreement; third-party assistance; good will of partners; tradition; trust; beneficial for farm prices; lack of competition) have been identified. High marketing costs along with the big enforcement costs of contracts in general, and enormous credit supply costs are the major factors restricting farm enlargement of Bulgarian farms as present stage. Besides, the most important factors for farm development in future relate to improvement of institutional environment (guaranteed marketing, enforcement of Laws and private contracts, macro-economic stability, legislation framework, access to free markets), and own and family experience in farm management.

Framework for Assessing Sustainability of Farms

The traditional approach for assessing farm sustainability (based on indicators of “productivity”, “profitability”, and “financial dependency”) fails to explain why there exist highly sustainable farms with different levels of “efficiency” such as low productive subsistent and part-time farming, non-for profit and cooperative enterprises, small commercial farms and large agro-corporations, etc. In this paper we adapt the New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics perspective to agrarian sphere, and suggest a new framework for assessing sustainability of farms and farm structures. Firstly, an analysis is made on various approaches for defining sustainability of agricultural systems: as “an ideology”, as “a set of strategies”, as “the ability to fulfill a set of goals”, and as “ability to continue”. The “problem of sustainability” in the economic model (mainly associated with “negative externalities”, “tragedy of commons”, “jointness of farm production”) is also presented, and the “institutional” solutions of that problem discussed. Second, we prove that analysis of institutions and transacting costs is important for proper understanding the farms sustainability. Institutional environment is the crucial factor, which determines the restrictions and costs of farm activities, and eventually - the level of sustainability of different farm organizations. In the specific institutional setting, agrarian agents use (or develop) a great variety of effective (cost economizing) market and non-market modes for governing of their exchanges. Therefore, studying the farm as a governance (rather than production) structure is the key for understanding the farm efficiency and sustainability. Third, we define sustainability of farm as a state when it manages all transactions in the most economical way – that is the situation when there exist no transaction, which could be carried out with net benefit. When a farm experiences high costs and difficulties meeting institutional restrictions and carrying out transactions, comparing to other feasible modes, it will be unsustainable. That is because there will be strong incentives for exploring the existing potential (adapting to sustainable state) through reduction or enlargement of farm size, or via reorganization or liquidation of the farm. Thus the farm potential for adaptation to changing (market, institutional, technological etc.) environment is to be the main indicator for farm sustainability. Furthermore, the most effective form for organization of farm transactions will depend on individuals’ characteristics (preferences, entrepreneurial abilities, risk aversion etc.) and specific attributes of each transaction (uncertainty, frequency, assets specificity, and appropriability). Consequently, effective farms of different type and size could persist (sustain) in agriculture. Finally, we develop a principle matrix with the effective modes for governing of agrarian sustainability. Discrete structural analysis is used to define the transactions for which market, contract, and integral forms are efficient (sustainable). We also determine the situation(s), where there is strong need for a third-party public involvement in agrarian sphere - that is for transactions with low appropriablity, and high uncertainty and asset specificity. In later case, there are no sustainable market and private modes to organize such transactions effectively (e.g. supply of environmental goods). Next, we specify the spectrum of possible public forms for intervention in market and private transactions - assistance, regulation, hybrid and in-house organization, international cooperation, property rights and institutional modernization. The comparative efficiency of feasible modes for public involvement is to be assessed taking into account the overall costs and benefits. Sustainable agrarian development is compromised when both market and private forms fails, and no effective public intervention takes place.

Interruption/Interaction/Collaboration: A Critical Appraisal of the Textual @traction Interactive Event

Interruption/Interaction/Collaboration: A Critical Appraisal of the Textual @traction Interactive Event

Mapping the Narrative in a Digital Album Cover

Mapping the Narrative in a Digital Album Cover

Governing on the Margins: Exploring the Contributions of Governmentality Studies to Critical Criminology in Canada

Despite the promise of the 1970s, critical criminology's influence in Canada has diminished in recent years. This paper examines this decline and charts one possible avenue for renewal. It argues that critical criminology has been limited by its emphasis on the state, and state-centred constructions of criminality, and by its failure to come to terms with how social injustices are reproduced through private institutions and modes of expertise constituted on the margins of the state and in the shadow of the law. Based on this critique, it is proposed that a dialogue with governmentality studies may help to overcome these limits, a dialogue that is examined in two substantive contexts: the governance of immigration and the policing of financial disorder. Revealed are not only forms of governance and oppression enacted on law's margins, but also possibilities for the realization of the progressive politics that lies at the heart of the critical criminological enterprise.

La dynamique de la recherche et développement aux Etats-Unis : origines et évolution du système d’innovation américain

This article concentrates on the historical transformations of the American system of innovation. It analyses the two major cycles that have shaped the informal and institutional development of research and development in the USA. Open innovation was first launched by individuals then internalized in firms before becoming an institutionalized and integrated mode of industrial and university research known as R&D. During the Second World War, this closed and private mode transformed itself into a national system of innovation overseen by the Federal Government. Changing socio-economic conditions and regulations in the 1980s have caused this governance system to become more open and pluralist, bringing to the fore key stakeholders such as firms, universities, networks, and innovative entrepreneurs. However, the globalization of innovation and the emergence of new competitors are currently challenging the open American model of competition-based innovation.

Web-Based Memorializing After September 11: Toward a Conceptual Framework

Web-based memorializing is an emerging set of social practices mediated by computer networks, through which digital objects, structures, and spaces of commemoration are produced. Based on in-depth analysis of eight Web sites produced to memorialize victims of the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, we demonstrate that Web-based memorializing bears a diverse array of characteristics, only some of which are consistent with offline memorializing. Our analysis suggests that although Web sites produced by institutions or organizations may differ somewhat in form and content from those produced by individuals, public and private modes of memorializing observed offline are interpenetrated on the Web. Finally, we identify communal functions served and contributions to public memory made via Web-based memorializing, and propose a conceptual framework for use in future studies of Web-based memorializing practices.

Mobile Publics: Beyond the Network Perspective

As practices of social coordination and connectivity shift in contemporary urban spaces, in part because of the increasing hybridisations of technologies and infrastructures of communication and transportation, public life is being reconfigured and respatialised. In this paper I argue that models of ‘publicity’ have paid insufficient attention to the ways in which publics are deeply embedded in social and machinic complexes involving the mobilities of people, objects, and information. The first half offers an overview of how the converging technologies of mobility and communication have created new temporalities and spatialities for public participation. In the second half I turn to a theoretical programme for rethinking public connectivity and disconnectivity not in terms of the conventional imagery of networks, but as more fluid and contingent social structures that Harrison White has described in terms of coupling and decoupling. Publics are becoming more ‘mobile’ in two ways: first, there is an increasing tendency to slip between private and public modes of interaction, as a result of the new forms of fluid connectivity enabled by mobile communication technologies; and, second, there are opportunities for new kinds of publics to assemble or gel momentarily (and then just as quickly dissolve) as a result of newly emerging places and arenas for communication.

Archipelagos and networks: urbanization and water privatization in the South

This paper examines the interrelationship between urbanization and water supply privatization in cities in the global South. The purpose of the paper is not to evaluate the impacts of privatization; rather, the paper analyses the differences in pathways and modes of water supply privatization, focusing on urban and contrasting with rural areas. A distinction is drawn between privatization (organizational change) and commercialization (institutional change) of water supply. Emphasis is placed upon the interrelationship between regulatory change (a shift from public to private management of water supply systems), human use of and access to water, and urban waterscapes. In contrast to metaphors of ‘networks’ so often applied in analyses of water management, the ‘archipelago’ is posited as a metaphor which better captures the complex overlapping strategies of water supply provision in urban areas in the South. Building on this metaphor, and in response to the ‘public–private’ dualism often invoked in studies of privatization, the paper outlines an alternative typology of water management in urban areas in the South. This typology foregrounds the concepts of the territorialization of corporate power as a means of understanding the articulation between privatization and urbanization processes in the South.

Satellite Communications Services for "Remote" Mobile and Fixed Site Users in the Oil and Gas Community

What is "Remote?" The community of users referred to as "Oil and Gas," along with many other resource-based industries in North America, have urgent requirements for cost-effective, reliable, and easy-to-use telecommunications in "remote" areas. Depending on the telecommunication service being considered, "remote" can mean several hundred kilometres from an urban area in the case of analog cellphone or two-way radio services. But in the case of two-way text messaging over digital cellphone networks, "remote" can mean 30–50 kms from large urban areas. Until very recently, companies and individuals operating in remote areas seldom considered satellite telecommunications as an affordable, reliable, and easy-to-use alternative to terrestrial-based cellular and two-way radio networks. However, regional mobile satellite service operators in several countries have demonstrated over the last seven years that satellite networks are an excellent complement to the limited coverage available from terrestrial networks. Some former terrestrial users have in fact switched to satellite networks because the satellite network provides better coverage and greater availability (i.e., reliability of service) at lower operating costs. Another important reason for the increasing usage of satellite networks is that the services and applications available over satellite are comparable to those available over traditional terrestrial networks. Satellite Coverage and Services Mobile Satellite Ventures (MSV) owns and operates the MSAT geostationary satellite network which provides a comprehensive range of telecommunications services throughout Canada, U.S.A., Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and most of Colombia and Venezuela. The MSAT-1 and MSAT-2 satellites also provide coverage 200 nautical miles off the east and west coasts of North America and throughout the Caribbean. MSV has pioneered the development of a broad range of services including phone, fax, circuit-switched data, dispatch radio, and packet-switched services. Other services, such as asset tracking, flight following, and differential GPS are also offered over the MSV network by independent operators. MSV Satellite Applications All of the MSV network services are utilized in the oil and gas industry. Mobile and fixed-site phone service and fax services are used extensively. Circuit-switched data operating at 2,400 or 4,800 bps provides access to Internet or Intranet e-mail using POP3 connections from ISPs. MSV circuit-switched data service supports continuous data transfer at 4,800 bps for parameters such as pump pressure, rotary speed, and pump load. Dispatch Radio Service provides half-duplex push-to-talk group-oriented communications services. The service replicates many elements of terrestrial "two-way radio" service and features up to 15 talk groups per mobile, private mode for one-on-one communications, priority one interrupt, and the flexibility to assign one of three different priorities to each talk group being monitored. One application of the push-to-talk dispatch radio service is in pipeline patrol where the dispatcher communicates with a fleet of vehicles in push-to-talk operation over the entire length of the pipeline. Proprietary local area networks are interfaced with the satellite network. Two major oil field service companies in the southern U.S. use Dispatch Radio as well as a company in northern B.C. that has service trucks setting up and tearing down rigs.

Trial and Error in Privatisation: Experiences in Urban Solid Waste Collection in Accra (Ghana) and Hyderabad (India)

Although privatisation policies have become extremely popular all over the developing world, there is still only scanty empirical evidence concerning the strengths and weaknesses of different organisational arrangements in service provision or concerning the overall impact of privatisation policies in specific sectors. In this paper, the socioeconomic performance of private modes of solid waste collection are contrasted with that of public modes of service delivery, using material from two different cities, Accra and Hyderabad. Although the forms of privatisation are quite distinct, there are a number of striking similarities in outcome. At the same time, the two cases demonstrate clearly that the dynamics of privatisation policies can only be understood within their particular societal context.

Telecommuting: The future of work, corporate culture, and American society

Throughout American history, first on the family farm and now in modern day business institutions, the workplace has been a stabilizing institution in American society that has anchored the ongoing, informal interactions occurring outside the workplace. In 1900, few Americans had a private mode of transportation. Barely 4,000 passenger automobiles were sold in 1900, and while horses were common, they were used primarily for farming, public transportation, and commercial activity in cities. By 1930, nearly 40 million cars had been added to America’s streets. The automobile recast life and work in central cities and eventually the suburbs.

Some Evidence of Travelers with Zero Value of Time

A small but growing body of evidence that questions the traditional view that travel is a derived demand is beginning to be assembled. Rather than assuming that all the positive components of a trip are contained in the activity at the destination, while the trip itself contains only dis-utility, a view is emerging that perhaps some people actually enjoy the travel component of the trip or at least are not willing to pay for reductions in the duration of the trip. One small addition to the patchwork of studies that are starting to form a basis for challenging the conventional assumption about positive value of time (VOT) is provided. By using the results obtained from a study of VOT in Singapore that used an adaptive stated preference survey technique, it was found that 23% of public mode users in that study had zero VOT, whereas 0% of private mode users in Singapore had zero VOT. Analysis of the characteristics of those with zero VOT shows either that they had lower incomes or that they had a greater degree of flexibility in their use of time. Some recent studies that have considered changes in VOT over time, in which there are indications that the marginal utility of time has been decreasing over time (because of increased free time, the increased utility of time spent traveling because of improved telecommunications, and a range of other factors), are also described. The implications of the findings are described in terms of the modeling of travel behavior and the evaluation of transport proposals.

Gender and daily mobility in a New Zealand city, 1920–1960

Although it is widely accepted that transport—like other social practices—is gendered, the concept of gender used in transport research is often one‐dimensional, with the focus on gendered variations in behaviour rather than on gendered meaning and identities. In this paper, I develop a more complex and multi‐stranded way of approaching the issue of gender and transport (or rather, daily mobility). A case study of a neighbourhood in the New Zealand city of Dunedin in the early decades of last century is presented to explore how the practices of daily mobility constituted gender. A three‐part concept of gender is developed as a basis for analysis: gender as a pattern of social relations, a cultural system of meaning and a component of personal identity. This is then used to analyse a collection of sixty oral histories. The period 1920–1960 is particularly interesting; in these decades extensive and widely used public transport systems (notably electric trams) shared urban streets with bicycles and pedestrians, and the emerging private modes of motorcycle and motor car. As new transport technologies were taken up, they offered the opportunity for new social practices to be formed around their use, for cultural meanings to be assigned to the technologies and for embodied individual subjectivities to be constructed. I argue that we can usefully interpret the shifting patterns of transport use through the lens of gender, and that we can come to understand the process by which gender is constructed by attention to everyday trip‐making and presence on the street.

Quality assessment of public and private modes of solid waste collection in Accra, Ghana

In the course of 5 yr, the system of solid waste collection (SWC) in Accra has undergone a fundamental turn from public to private provision. The transition was motivated by the apparent inability of the city's Waste Management Department to deal with the mounting problems of waste collection and the prevailing belief that the market would help to overcome these. The indigenous private sector was called upon to improve service performance. Until mid-1999 public and private modes of SWC co-existed, enabling a systematic comparison between them using a 10-point assessment scheme. The analysis shows that privatisation has benefited consumers in terms of wider coverage, higher frequency, and more reliable services, but that there are also a number of drawbacks, notably worsened labour conditions and increased environmental dangers. The greatest flaw, however, is its lack of financial sustainability. This is related to the non-commercial nature of the service, particularly the social and political sensitivity of cost recovery in a poor country. The central government's 1999 decision to impose a private monopoly in SWC—in order to speed up the process and solve the waste collection problem in the metropolis once and for all—is criticised. This decision will compound financial problems, hamper the development of an indigenous business sector and fail to build on the potentials of a system that seemed very promising.

Structures for Organization of Transactions in Bulgarian Agriculture

In this paper we extend our previous efforts to incorporate achievements of the New Institutional and Transaction Cost Economics to the agrarian sphere. First, we demonstrate that Bulgarian agrarian economy is a Transaction cost economy, and clarify various types of transacting costs in transitional conditions. Next, we describe existing structures for governing of agrarian transactions, and evaluate their costs minimizing and incentive potential. Lastly, we estimate prospects for organizational modernization, and determine effective boundaries of market, private, public, and mixed modes for agrarian transacting. Neoclassical scenario for transformation of previous communist model (free market plus private ownership) has not worked in Bulgarian agriculture. Transition has changed rules of the game but it has not made agrarian agents more rational and opportunistic. Consequently costs for new property rights and institutional and for market and private modes of individual transacting, have taken a good part of all social expenditures. High assets dependency, big uncertainty, low appropriability, and less frequency have determined a specific transitional structure of agrarian transacting. Less market transacting, big reliance on informal relationships at large scale, great extent of over integrated modes, part time farming and production cooperation phenomenon, block of all classes of transactions etc, all have come to existence. Besides, a large number of inefficient or contradictory third party (e.g. Government, Non-governmental organizations, international assistance etc) involvements in agrarian transacting have been in place. All this has deformed substantially emerging farming system, and domination of primitive and gray structures, little sustainability of large business and cooperative farms, significant distortion of national agrarian capital, and backward technological development, have come to agenda. Low efficiency of public in-house organization and limited budget sources would restrict Government direct intervention in agrarian transactions. Agrarian policy should be toward exploring potential of market, private, and cooperative modes through new property rights provision, institutional and infrastructural support, improving law and contract enforcement, market information, extension education, assisting farmers association etc. Less expensive modes for trilateral governance (coordination, control on opportunism, incentives for specific investments) with active involvement of private sector and farmers organizations are to be preferred.

Social Costs of Transformation to a Market Economy in Post-Socialist Countries: The Cases of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary by Jan s> Adam (review)

REVIEWS 589 facilities:only I I% of respondentshad ever applied, among whom one-third of the men, but none of the women, were successful.The old and the new tapi was in the name of the family head, of whom in the sample just 5% were women. After each production collapse the InternationalMonetary Fund sought to helpAlbanian economic recoveryby providingsubstantialcreditsconditional on the government'sadoption of measuresfora marketsystem(includingland registration) and for macroeconomic stabilization. Its current three-year Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (i 998-2001) releases tranches of creditin stepwith the fulfilmentof 14 'structuralbenchmarks',one of which is quarterlytotals of land title registrations.The WorldBankis funding a Rural FinancingFundforsmallcreditto farmers.The institutionalconstraintswhich Lemel'ssurveydetailed arebeing relaxed,but the societalinhibitionswill take longer to tackle. Institutefor German Studies, University ofBirmingham MICHAEL KASER StAntony's College, Oxford Adam, Jan. SocialCostsof Transformation to a MarketEconomy in Post-Socialist Countries. TheCasesof Poland,theCzechRepublic andHungagy. Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, and St Martin's Press, New York, 1999. XiV+ 212 pp. Preface.Tables. Notes. Bibliography.Index. ?45.??. FROM the outset Adam lets the reader know that his own preference for a transformation strategy is moderately social-democratically oriented. Since the present reviewer basically shares this orientation, a quick perusal of the table of contents and listof tablesled him to expect a vigorouschallenge to the 'Washington consensus' the conventional neo-liberal wisdom on the substance and sequence of the changes necessary to transform the former Soviet-type economies to prosperousand democratic free-marketeconomies and societies. This expectation is only partly fulfilled,largely because of the arid mode of exegesis and the author's neglect of the political dimensions of the struggleover reformsin the three countriesin question. Adam provides copious materials for such considerations. After a useful introduction to the respective starting points of the three economies and a brief account of their differentstrategiesfor transformation,he gives a more detailed account in separate chapters of their respective performance in implementing their reform programmes. In another chapter he describes in detail the different modes of privatization-vouchersin the Czech Republic and Poland (albeit with a differentialemphasis) and direct sales (largely to foreigners) in Hungary. Adam provides a useful four-point checklist of the objectives of privatization:redistributionof economic power and influence; strengthening of domestic socio-economic institutions;enhancement of economic efficiency;and procurement of revenues for the state treasury(p. 69). He demonstratesthat in terms of revenue-raisingneither the Polish nor the Czech modes of privatization were conspicuously successful and, in the Hungarian case, the revenue raisedwas not effectivelyutilized. Nor were the three countries very successfulon the other criteria. He makes the point 590 SEER, 79, 3, 2001 albeit not very forcefully that the shift away from state ownership is no guaranteeof economic or managerialefficiency. In Part III, on the Social Costs of Transformation, there are separate chapters on Unemployment, the Standard of Living, Social Policy and Poverty.All of these topics are bolsteredwith tabulardata (unfortunatelynot going furtherthan I997) and relativelypedestrianrehearsalsof the changes in policy direction and emphasis during the early post-Communist years up to I997. Adam shows how the new economic systemshave simplybeen unable to maintainthe previoussocial and economic securityprovisions,particularly as the depressant effect of belt-tightening on GDP has reduced budgetary incomes. For various reasons, including a low level of inherited state indebtedness, the CR had less need to restrainpublic spending, but the neoliberalideology of the Klaus Governmentled it to do so anyway.Adam makes some interestingobservationsabout the relationship(orlackof same)between employment levels and GDP movements. The use of unemployment to maintain low or negative growth of real wages has given governments in the three countries more leeway in restrictingsocial expendituresthan they had any rightto expect in nominallydemocraticpoliticalconditions. Much of this material is certainly useful, not to say insightful,but there is insufficientgeneralization on the validity of the transformationstrategiesor reflection on popular reactions to them. Public opinion data do exist. Unfortunately, in the real world, things change rapidly, as do the political attitudes of the people being affected by the changes inflicted upon them in the name of modernization and qualificationfor membershipof the prosperous EU club. In dismay over their fate, the people repeatedly elect social democrats and unenthusiastic reformers, only to see them pressing...

VICTORIAN MELODRAMA AND THE PERFORMANCE OF POVERTY

QUESTIONSABOUT THE PERFORMATIVE NATURE of Victorian culture have received extended attention in the past decade or so as critics have begun to examine the relationship between representation and subjectivity.1 By and large, such studies have fruitfully problematized our received assumptions about the private character of the Victorians. At the same time, however, they have also implicitly privileged the middle-class frames of reference that shape the distinction, for even as they complicate our understanding of performance by calling into question the distinction between public and private modes, critics who take up such issues tend not to question the stability of the categories of experience under scrutiny. As a result, while we gain important new insights into the cultural formation of identity or genre underwritten by the separation of public and private spheres, we also risk reading all Victorians as if their relationships to such ideological formations were identical with those of the emerging middle class.

Interview mode and measurement of sexual behaviors: Methodological issues

Studies of sexual and other sensitive behaviors are often fraught with a variety of reporting biases. When IAQs are used to collect data, respondents may underreport certain sensitive behaviors and overreport normative behaviors. SAQs can also pose problems: requiring that respondents be literate and be able to follow skip patterns. In recent years, the development of computerized technologies—audio‐CASI and T‐ACASI—have begun to overcome some of the limitations of IAQs and SAQs. By providing a more private mode for data collection and standardized delivery of all questions, as well as automated skip patterns and range checks, audio‐CASI and T‐ACASI have been tested in a number of studies and found to be an effective way of reducing response bias, and thus, contributing to a better understanding of the prevalence and patterns of sexual and other sensitive behaviors.

The accuracy of non-spatial techniques for analyzing transportation demand

The economic logic of using models of transportation demand based upon non-spatial estimating methods is questioned. The accuracy of the most common non-spatial technique for estimating the demand for transport is assessed by simulating transportation networks. Two simulations are offered: in the first, transportation costs are assumed to act as a tariff between single producing and consuming regions. In the second, producers and consumers are spatially dispersed and connected by a public and private mode of transportation. The relationship between transport prices and equilibrium traffic levels is computed for different structural determinants in each of the two problems. The resulting data are then analyzed using the traditional technique and the results compared with the true transportation demand elasticities. Estimates based on the non-spatial method are shown to be deceptively reasonable, but are inversely correlated with true demand elasticities in the first example and uncorrected with the truth in the second example.