T HE dietary choice of households near subsistence levels of nutrient intake is one of obvious policy importance. In many countries, such as Bangladesh, national goals are set in terms of nutritional intake and there is heavy intervention in the markets for foods. However, little is known about the manner in which food preferences vary with food expenditure and nutrient intake. The design of efficient programs to aid nutritionally deficient households in attaining minimal levels of nutrient intake requires information on all ownand cross-price elasticities for both target and non-target groups. The net effect of a food price subsidy on the consumption of food nutrients cannot be predicted without knowledge of the complete elasticity matrix. Results presented below demonstrate that substitution effects can be so strong that the subsidization of certain foods quite often reduces nutrient consumption. In this study, demand equations for nine foods which allow for extremely flexible consumer price response are estimated from the individual budgets of 5,750 rural Bangladeshi households. Estimation at the household level is preferred because it more readily permits the incorporation of household composition variables into the demand analysis, such as household size, occupation and employment status, that are typically lost in aggregation. There is also a greater range and variation in expenditure levels than found in grouped data. This is of particular importance in the study of nutritional well-being as it is the poorest households which are of special interest. Moreover, the household sample provides sufficient degrees of freedom to estimate a simple varying parameter model which requires the estimation of 270 parameters. Previous econometric analysis of income-class specific dietary choice has been limited and not altogether satisfactory. Pinstrup-Anderson, de Londono and Hoover (1976) estimated complete sets of price elasticities for different income strata using Frisch's scheme in order to study the impact of changes in relative prices on nutrient consumption. Their results are suspect because of the assumption of want independence necessary for this methodology to be valid. Alderman and Timmer (1980), who were also concerned with studying the relationship between food price policy and nutrient intake by income classes, econometrically estimated separate price coefficients for each income group by including slope dummy variables in their demand equations for rice and cassava in Indonesia. The inclusion of these dummy variables revealed surprisingly large differences in compensated price response across income groups. Although their results support the notion that poorer households respond differently to prices than the rich, the limitations of their data constrained them to consider only two foods and to specify changes in price response which are discontinuous with respect to income. I The formulation and estimation of the food demand equations is discussed in section II below. Section III presents the results of the estimation and discusses the nutritional implications of movements in relative food prices and other exogenous variables. Section IV summarizes our findings.

M. Anne Hill, Female Labor Force Participation in Developing and Developed Countries-- Consideration of the Informal Sector, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Aug., 1983), pp. 459-468

This paper reports on another attempt to statistically uncover evidence of embodied technological change as an explanation of changes in labor productivity in the United States. In this version of the test, an interregional cross-section, time-series sample of data was used. While the hypothesis has a lot of appeal, it has proven difficult to find manifestations of embodiment in econometric tests. This study has proven to be no exception. Despite the unique data set, results were again not supportive of the hypothesis. A possible limitation of this test is that the time period studied may have been too short. REFERENCES

THE X-inefficiency costs of protection and industrial concentration have been topics of considerable interest in the literature on economic development. Balassa (1975) and Bergsman (1974), for example, have argued that protection, by increasing X-inefficiency, generates a major welfare cost which is not captured by traditional costs of protection calculations, and White (1976) has examined the relationship between inappropriate factor intensities which he associates with Xinefficiency and industrial concentration. The common theme which emerges from each of these studies is that public policy can have a major impact on economic performance not only by influencing factor proportions, but also by influencing the intensity with which a non-measurable input, X-efficiency, is employed. Despite the intuitive appeal of the X-efficiency concept there have been very few empirical tests of this hypothesis. This partly reflects the imprecise nature of the basic concept but also the lack of adequate micro economic data. X-efficiency clearly relates to efficiency within firms so that the most appropriate tests would rely on data on firm-level efficiency. In this paper we propose a direct test of the X-efficiency hypothesis using firm-level data. We build on previous work by Corden (1970, 1974) and Martin (1978) who showed how to model X-efficiency effects using the concept of managerial leisure. We extend these simple models of managerial behavior, emphasizing the role of the external managerial labor market. The model is then used to explore the relationship between changes in public policy, managerial effort and X-inefficiency. Certain predictions of the model are tested using cross-section data from a survey of firms in two subsidized industries in Ghana. Efficiency indices are computed on the basis of a translog frontier production function. Variations in relative efficiency are then correlated with several explanatory variables including the presence or absence of subsidy payments to the firm. Subsidized firms in both industries are found to exhibit higher relative levels of X-inefficiency.

Daniel H. Hill, Deborah A. Ott, Lester D. Taylor, James M. Walker, Incentive Payments in Time-of-Day Electricity Pricing Experiments: The Arizona Experience, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Feb., 1983), pp. 59-65