The objective of this study is to explore the possibilities of improving production and income on small farms through better allocation of resources. It pertains to the area that represents the low potential cereal crops zone (LPCZ) of Ethiopian highlands in the Shoa region. The basic primary...

Few studies have been made of how fanners make decisions. Most research and teaching has focused on the decision event, not the whole process. Current knowledge of the decision making process is reviewed and described as a set of eight functions or elements: values and goals, problem detection,...

This paper provides an updated review of the evidence on income pooling across household members. Income pooling is one of the main predictions of the unitary model of the household. New studies come to much the same conclusion as do past studies: income pooling and the unitary model are...

This paper investigates the factors responsible for a drastic decline in the growth rate of labor productivity of the agricultural sector for the 1956-90 period. This investigation is carried out by a newly devised procedure which decomposes the growth rate of labor productivity into (1) the...

This paper examines changes in agricultural productivity in 18 developing countries over the period 1961-1985. We use a nonparametric, output-based Malmquist index and a parametric variable coefficients Cobb-Douglas production function to examine, whether our estimates confirm results from other...

A linear programming algorithm is presented for determination of farm plans that are efficient under the mean-Gini criterion. Use of the algorithm is illustrated by applying it to a standard problem from the literature. The set of efficient plans is compared with those based on meanvariance and...

A quality-of-life index (QLI), a proxy measure of utility, is constructed by factor-weighted and simple-summation weighted aggregation of socio-psychological measures of well-being. The socio-psychological measures were constructed from quality of life domains taken from selected years of the...

Since the early 1970s there has been interest in the application of optimal control theory to the management of economic systems. Specifically, optimal control theory prescribes policy strategies which optimise a quantifiable policy preference function subject to market equilibrium conditions....