The future of small farms in Asia

Farms throughout Asia are predominantly small. By nature, small farms use labour‐intensive production methods. The question arises as to the viability of small farms in the face of the rapidly increasing wage rate in most Asian countries. There is also indication that the production efficiency of small farms has declined relative to large farms in many Asian economies, indicating the increasing disadvantage of small farms in Asia. Therefore, this study argues that unless new policy measures are taken to expand farm size, Asia as a whole is likely to lose comparative advantage in agriculture and become an importer of food grains in the future.     

Strong consistency in nonlinear regression with multipucative error

Sufficient conditions are given to ensure the existence of a sequence of strongly consistent estimators of the true parameter for a nonlinear regression model naving random regressors and a multiplicative disturbance term. Special cases of this result include the least absolute value and the least squares estimation procedures.