Recent work by agricultural economists has failed to adequately identify why consumers desire country-of-origin labeling, a key piece of information needed to determine whether a market-failure exists. This paper brings to the attention of agricultural economists a sizable body of literature on country-of-origin effects from the marketing and business disciplines. Based on this literature, we draw a distinction between several consumer motivations for origin labels and we identify which of these is cause for public policy. We propose several research questions that require answers if the consequences of country-of-origin labeling policy are to be fully understood.

Several spatial econometric approaches are available to model spatially correlated disturbances in count models, but there are at present no structurally consistent count models incorporating spatial lag autocorrelation. A two-step, limited information maximum likelihood estimator is proposed to fill this gap. The estimator is developed assuming a Poisson distribution, but can be extended to other count distributions. The small sample properties of the estimator are evaluated with Monte Carlo experiments. Simulation results suggest that the spatial lag count estimator achieves gains in terms of bias over the aspatial version as spatial lag autocorrelation and sample size increase. An empirical example deals with the location choice of single-unit start-up firms in the manufacturing industry in the US between 2000 and 2004. The empirical results suggest that in the dynamic process of firm formation, counties dominated by firms exhibiting (internal) increasing returns to scale are at a relative disadvantage even if localization economies are present.

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Community-focused agriculture has been heralded as a development strategy to induce local economic growth. This study examines county-level linkages between community-focused agriculture and growth in total agricultural sales and economic growth more broadly. Using Census of Agriculture data, regional growth models are estimated on real personal income per capita change between 2002 and 2007. We find no association between community-focused agriculture and growth in total agricultural sales at the national level, but do in some regions of the United States. A $1 increase in farm sales led to an annualized increase of $0.04 in county personal income. With few exceptions, community-focused agriculture did not make significant contributions to economic growth in the time period analyzed.