Much remains to be done before agricultural trade is as liberal as world trade in manufactures. But agriculture is distorted by more than agricultural policies. In developing countries especially, farming is discouraged not only by farm protection policies in high-income countries but also by those countries' own manufacturing policies and distortions to services markets. This paper explores th...

The study was conducted in Assosa district of Benishangul-Gumuz regional state, western Ethiopia, to assess major farm enterprises, agricultural risks and demand for micro-insurance services. Two peasant associations namely, Selga-23 and Kushmengel were selected to represent settler and native farming communities, respectively. Using simple randomized techniques, 86 respondents were selected fo...

This paper presents the design of an implementation-independent Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) which is the main basis of the ICENI Grid middleware. Three implementations of this architecture have been provided on top of Jini, JXTA and the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI). The main goal of this paper is to discuss these different implementations and provide an analysis of their adv...

SOA and REST are the two main architectural styles used for distributed applications. Current SOA implementations use Web Services, which have a flexible service interface but lack resource structure. Current REST implementations use HTTP, with good structural support (through URIs) but fixed service interface, leading to a significant mismatch in modeling some application artifacts. In additio...

In recent years, many countries have realized the need to revive agricultural extension services to promote pro-poor growth, reach poor marginalised smallholder farmers and address new challenges on sustainability, environmental degradation and climate change. This paper discusses evolving concepts and approaches in agricultural extension, past experiences of key countries, problems and failure...

criticism of public extension services has resulted in various countries seeking alternative approaches for provision of these services. in all these approaches, extension personnel are the key factors to the success of the implementation. today, agricultural extension services in turkey bear the responsibility of the ministry of food, agriculture and livestock. a number of non-public extension...

A web services based architecture for Language Resources utilizing existing technology such as XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI is presented. The web services architecture creates a pervasive information infrastructure that enables straightforward access to two kinds of Language Resources: traditional information sources and language processing resources. Details about two practical implementations of ...

This paper provides a quantitative study of the economic effects of a stylised simulation of trade liberalisation for Ireland using the GTAP model. The experiment incorporates the liberalisation of agricultural, manufacturing and services trade as well as measures to improve trade facilitation. The simulation is implemented against a baseline projection of the Irish and world economy over the n...

This paper evaluates the nonmarket activities provided by farmers for recreational and residential purposes in several European regions. A regionally specified general equilibrium model is used to derive the efficiency conditions for a competitive equilibrium to guarantee a Pareto optimal outcome, and some conclusions regarding compensation payments are drawn. Furthermore, existing compensation...

We develop a model of decision makers’ demand for agricultural economic information services. This model treats choice of external decision-support services as a function of actors’ assessment of how alternative investments in information complement their internal competencies. Data from a survey in four commodity systems are used to evaluate hypotheses as to how human capital, and functional r...