Marginal Trade-Offs for Improved Agro-Ecological Efficiency Using Data Envelopment Analysis

Today’s agricultural management decisions impact food security and sustainable ecosystems, even when operating with back-to-basic operations. In such endeavors, policymakers usually need a quantitative tool, such as trade-offs margins, to effectively adjust resource consumption or production. This paper applies the weighted slack-based measurement (SBM-DEA) program to 136 developing countries’ agricultural performance. First, it finds the current agricultural efficiency and then makes marginal trade-offs on desirable-output variables (such as crop yield and forest area) to see the effective changes in undesirable-output (such as methane and nitrous oxide emissions). The results show that choosing effective marginal trade-offs does not deteriorate the relative efficiency of the decision-making units (DMUs) below the efficient frontier line. Thus, such a method enables the decision-makers to determine the best marginal trade-off points to reach the optimal efficiencies and decide which output factor needs special brainstorming to design effective policy.

Trade-Offs for the Optimal Energy Efficiency of Road Transportation: Domestic Cases in Developing Countries

The increase in domestic transportation in developing countries may adversely affect the energy efficiency of road transportation due to effective productivity and carbon dioxide emissions (CO2). When evaluating quantitatively the countries on the efficiency frontier, poor efficiency can still be seen sometimes due to the slack available in undesirable output measures. This paper uses desirable and undesirable output variables, such as passenger-kilometers (PKM), tones-kilometers (TKM), and carbon dioxide (CO2), to compute the weakly efficient decision-making units (DMUs). The data envelopment analysis (DEA) technology is used to assess the efficiencies of the decision-making units (DMUs), which are countries in our case. Then, the trade-off method with efficient binding surfaces is used to attain the optimal efficiencies of the weakly efficient DMUs. The marginal rates aid this trade-off analysis. Resultantly, such marginal trade-offs do not deteriorate the efficiency of the DMUs below the frontier line. We calculate the maximum change (margin) in a specific variable amount when another variable’s amount is changed. Thus, such a computation gives us different margins, with which each output variable can be a traded off to bring a DMU further toward the closest optimal point possible. The marginal trade-off can help the managers and policymakers in effective decision-making, and it is further recommended to address efficiency damages (by the undesired outputs).

Foraging Wild Resources and Sustainable Economic Development

<p><em>As exemplified by the MDGs’ adoption in 2000, it was recently thought that poverty alleviation, hunger reduction and environmental conservation should be tackle simultaneously. For that purpose, forests people had to intensively exploit and to commercialize the wild resources (NTFPs) they usually foraged from the nature for their self-consumption and for marginal trade. After a first wave of optimism, most studies have however concluded that such outcome was dubious, i.e.</em><em>,</em><em> that foraging was not able to sustain economic development. We consider a theoretical framework and provide an economic analysis explaining such result. We identify four cases, according to two distinctions. First, foraged wild resources can be used either for self-consumption or traded on the market. Second, foraging can be either an exclusive mode of production or be combined with farming. However, an economic development based on the intensive exploitation of wild resources (through specialized foraging and trade) is not sustainable in the long-term. When considered as an economic system, the persistence of foraging wild resources is only consistent with self-consumption or with marginal trade. Intensive foraging dedicated to trade and market extension lead to the disappearance of sharing (or cooperation) between foragers; wild resources as well as most foragers are likely to get worse in such situation even though some counter-examples can be identified.</em></p>