Measures the changes in environmental quality that occurred in the early years of economic transition for 12 former centrally planned economies. The authors address the empirical question of whether the transition from a centrally planned to a market-driven economy exacerbates environmental degradation or stimulates environmental improvements. The results indicate a strong relationship between environmental improvement and price liberalization, trade and foreign exchange reforms, enterprise restructuring, and prevarication reforms.

The relationship between real exports and exchange rate volatility is investigated using panel data analysis at the firm level. Results indicate that there is no negative or positive relationship between volatility and real exports. In addition, firm size and level of international activity do not influence the size and significance of the volatility effect on exports. However, there is some evidence that firms use import revenue to lower their exchange rate exposure.

This study tests the PPP hypothesis for transition economies by using a panel approach. The results show that PPP holds for transition economies suggesting a half-life convergence of about one year. This study also compares the convergence rates for ‘less open’ and ‘more open’ transition countries. It is found that ‘more open’ transition economies converge faster than ‘less open’ transition economies.

This study looks into the factual link between nitrogen fertilizer use and the land annual mean temperature anomalies arising from climate change, incorporating the effect of income and agriculture share to understand better their impact on emissions from agricultural activities along climate indicators. The study unearths causalities associated with this link by employing the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) with back-dated actual panel data specifically constructed for this study by combining four datasets from 2002 to 2010. In the long-run, the causality is significant and unidirectional, indicating that income, agriculture share, and land temperature anomalies cause agricultural emissions, and that disequilibrium from such emissions is not eliminated within a year. In the short-run, the effective use of nitrogen fertilizers and other associated agricultural practices can be achieved as countries approach per capita income of 7000 USD. Changes in the structure of economies have an expected effect on agricultural emissions. Temperature anomalies increase agricultural emissions from nitrogen fertilizers, possibly due to the fact that the potential negative impacts of these anomalies are mitigated by farmers through changes in crop production inputs. Therefore, as part of adoption strategies, to avoid the excessive and inefficient use of nitrogen fertilizers by farmers, economic incentives should be aligned with the national and global incentives of sustainability.

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This study examines the effects of the reduced transaction costs on the price behaviours in the second half of the nineteenth century, where declines in transaction costs were mainly caused by railroad development during this period. It employs a panel test introduced by Levin and Lin (1992) on the convergence of wheat and corn prices using a panel of 48 US states from 1866 to 1906. The results show that, by decreasing transportation costs, railroads played an important role in price convergence among states of the USA for wheat and corn during the postbellum period.

Providing about two million employments from textile to agriculture, cotton is an important and a strategic product for Turkey. Thus, support programs become critical and crucial for the cotton production. For cotton farmers, premium payments affecting the cost measures become vital next to the market prices. This study measures the technical efficiency of cotton production, incorporating support premium payments as one of the background variables to capture the effect of premiums on efficiency scores for cotton production using stochastic frontier model. The premium payments found to be the most important determinant of inefficiencies, and the results of our analysis suggest that premiums paid to farmers increase efficiency for cotton production. In addition, regional production was important explaining inefficiencies. Although three regions in Turkey did not behave parallel and showed different characteristics in production, efficiency gap between these regions is closed recently. © 2013 CEEUN

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