With the end of the Supermarket Revolution in the 1970s, new forms of horizontal, vertical, and geographic competition have appeared to challenge the supremacy of the supermarket format. New retail formats like warehouse stores, supercenters, and fast-food outlets appear to affect local retail supermarket prices. Slotting allowances, coupons, and electronic data gathering have intensified retailer-manufacturer rivalry. Foreign direct investment offers the promise of new European-style management styles in U.S. grocery retailing.

The signing of the Uruguay Round agreement on agriculture (URAA) in 1994 was a significant step towards the liberalization of world agricultural trade. A new round of negotiations on agriculture is scheduled to begin under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the end of 1999. This paper discusses the likely agenda of those negotiations and their implications for agriculture in the northeastern United States.

Future trade negotiations will incorporate environmental concerns. This study presents a framework to evaluate whether the United States would be willing to adopt a pesticide restriction in exchange for European Union liberalization of producer support. It outlines the conditions that must be met if a bargain is to occur. Partial equilibrium commodity models test whether the conditions for a bargaining solution are satisfied. The research results indicate that a potential bargain is possible for stricter U.S. environmental regulations in coarse grains if there is a sufficiently large positive EU externality. Conditions in the oilseed market preclude a bargain.

The entrance of additional countries into a European customs union, in this case Turkey, and its impact on agriculture are examined. Results from a trade simulation model are used as components of a Political Preference Function and utilized within a game theoretic framework to identify the optimal strategies for Turkey, the EU, and the U.S. Turkey's best interest, from an agricultural perspective, involves adoption of agreements made in the Uruguay round of GATT as a developing country rather than applying EU protection. Although free trade is not the optimal solution, simulations indicate that the solution does involve the reduction of agricultural protection levels.

This study estimates demand for wheat differentiated by classes using a dynamic AIDS model for the United States and the European Union (EU). The results suggest that imported wheat is more price responsive than domestic wheat in the U.S. market but not in the EU market. This may suggest that the Canadian policy that reduces prices of Canadian wheat in the U.S. market or U.S. export subsidies that raise prices of U.S. wheat could be expected to give rise to substantial substitution of Canadian for U.S. wheat. It is also found that in the EU, complementary relationships exist between spring and other wheat groups. This complementary relationship between the lower and higher quality wheat in the EU is not surprising because EU millers blend cheaper wheat such as EU common wheat and U.S. other wheat with high protein (spring) to obtain the preferred characteristics.

Traditional measures of productivity growth may not fully account for all sources of growth during the transition from conventional to alternative cropping systems. This paper treats soil quality as part of the production process and incorporates it directly into rotational measures of productivity growth. An application to data from an experimental cropping system in Pennsylvania suggests that both experimental learning and soil-quality improvements were important sources of growth during the system's transition.

Conjoint analysis was used to evaluate the preferences of graphic designers toward kenaf paper. Results indicate that price is of overwhelming importance to designers in their purchasing decisions regarding paper stock. If priced competitively with existing wood and recycled papers, kenaf products should gain market share among designers.

In view of continuing economic stagnation and consequent budgetary constraints facing the state, Hawaii public libraries have been concerned with their operational efficiency and library managers have been seeking better methods in allocating limited resources among the libraries. This paper employed data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique to assess the performance and resource utilization efficiency of 47 public libraries in Hawaii. Three output measures—circulation, reader visits, and reference transactions and four input categories—collection, library staff, days open, and nonpersonal expenditures were used in the analysis. For fiscal year 1996/97, the estimated technical efficiency scores for Hawaii State public library branches ranged from 0.45 to 1.00, with an average of 0.84. The results showed that 14 of the 47 libraries are technically efficient. The estimated efficiency scores were related to relevant library-specific factors and community characteristics, such as total floor space, size of collection, population density, and location to identify factors influencing library performance. Only floor space and volume of collection did show moderate positive effects on library performance. The resulting information can be mainly useful in improving the performance of inefficient libraries. With special consideration to factors uncontrollable by the libraries the results may also be useful in allocating limited resources among them.

Pheasant hunting benefits of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) were approximately $80 million/year in 1991 in states where the CRP appears most critical to pheasant populations. To obtain this benefit measure, the demand for pheasant hunting was estimated using a recently developed multi-site demand model, a national survey on recreation, and environmental data processed through a geographic information system (GIS). Thus not only is the resulting evaluation of the CRP's environmental impacts more accurately assessed than through the use of the generalized, supply-demand equilibrium models of previous work, but, more importantly, the environmental benefits of program acreage can be compared across field locations allowing subtle changes in policy to be assessed and the design and operation of a program to be optimized.

A hedonic pricing model is developed to estimate the effects of policies to control agricultural sedimentation on lakeside property values at 15 Ohio state park lakes. Using an LA/AIDS demand system, we estimate changes in social welfare that result from upstream soil conservation practices and/or lake dredging activity, while holding other property characteristics constant. Policy simulation results suggest that lakeside residents generally have a higher willingness to pay on an annualized basis for sediment reduction from upstream soil conservation than for lake dredging. This has important implications for soil conservation policy, particularly in targeting improvements in the economic efficiency of the Conservation Reserve Program.

Economic surveys of fisheries are undertaken in several countries as a means of assessing the economic performance of their fisheries. The level of economic profits accruing in the fishery can be estimated from the average economic profits of the boats surveyed. Economic profits consist of two components—resource rent and intra-marginal rent. From a fisheries management perspective, the key indicator of performance is the level of resource rent being generated in the fishery. Consequently, these different components need to be separated out. In this paper, a means of separating out the rent components is identified for a heterogeneous fishery. This is applied to the multi-purpose fleet operating in the English Channel. The paper demonstrates that failing to separate out these two components may result in a misrepresentation of the economic performance of the fishery.