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Incentive Payment (incentive + payment)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	75%

Selected Abstracts

Food safety approaches to examining HACCP costs and performance and technologies

AGRIBUSINESS : AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Issue 2 2007
Michael Ollinger
In this article, the authors describe the survey methodology needed to obtain data to support several empirical analyses dealing with food safety issues. The most striking finding about the survey methodology was the much higher response rate due to the use of priority mail and an incentive payment of $5 versus priority mail only or first-class mail only. Letters of support from the major meat and poultry trade associations and the up to five contacts of potential survey respondents by the surveying organization also appear to have improved the response rate. Overall, the survey methodology yielded nearly 1,000 responses from 1,705 possible meat and poultry plants on their costs of compliance with the Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point rule of 1996, plant characteristics, and use of food safety technologies and practices. [EconLit Citations: L250, L510, L150] © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Agribusiness 23: 193,210, 2007. [source]

Evaluating the Effect of Conservation Policies on Agricultural Land Use: A Site-specific Modeling Approach

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 3 2004
Katsuya Tanaka
This study evaluates quantitatively the effect of three policies (payments for cropland retirement, fertilizer use taxes and payments for crop rotations) on agricultural land use in the upper Mississippi River basin. This is done by estimating two logit models of land use decisions using data from the 1982, 1987,1992 and 1997 Natural Resource Inventories. The models predict farmers' crop choice, crop rotation and participation in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) at more than 48,000 Natural Resource Inventories sites under each of the three policies. Results suggest that an increase in the CRP rental rates would significantly increase the CRP acreage, but most of the acreage increase would come initially from less fertilizer-intensive crops. In contrast, a fertilizer use tax would significantly reduce acreage planted to more fertilizer-intensive crops, and thus would likely be cost effective for reducing agricultural chemical use and pollution. Although an incentive payment for a corn-soybean rotation would raise acreage of this rotation and reduce the acreage of continuous corn, the acreage response is in general quite inelastic. Cette étude évalue quantitativement les effets rovoqués par les trois politiques (paiements pour le retrait des terres cultivables, taxes sur l'utilisation d'engrais et paiements pour l'alternance des cultures) sur les terres agricoles du bassin supérieur du Mississipi. Ceci est obtenu en évaluant deux modéles logit des décisions sur l'utilisation des terres provenant des données des «Natural Resource Inventories» de 1982, 1987, 1992 et 1997. Les modéles prédisent le choix des cultures des agriculteurs, l'alternance des cultures et la participation du «Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)» dans plus de 48 000 Natural Resource Inventories dans le cadre de chacune des trois politiques. Les résultats suggérent qu'une augmentation des taux de location du CRP accroisse de maniére significative la surface de CRP, mais la majeure partie de cet accroissement de surface provenaient initialement de cultures moins intensives sans engrais. Cependant, l'utilisation d'une taxe sur l'utilisation d'engrais pouvait réduire de maniére significative la surface plantée avec des récoltes intensives utilisant plus d'engrais, et ainsi ce serait sans doute plus économique pour réduire la pollution et l'utilisation de produits chimiques en agriculture. Bien que des paiements incitatifs à l'alternance maïs-soja réduisent la surface d'une culture continue de maïs et augmentaient la surface de l'alternance maïs-soja, les résultats aux transformations des surfaces des terres seraient tout à fait rigides. [source]

Getting Real Performance Out of Pay-for-Performance

THE MILBANK QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2008
SEAN NICHOLSON
Context: Most private and public health insurers are implementing pay-for-performance (P4P) programs in an effort to improve the quality of medical care. This article offers a paradigm for evaluating how P4P programs should be structured and how effective they are likely to be. Methods: This article assesses the current comprehensiveness of evidence-based medicine by estimating the percentage of outpatient medical spending for eighteen medical processes recommended by the Institute of Medicine. Findings: Three conditions must be in place for outcomes-based P4P programs to improve the quality of care: (1) health insurers must not fully understand what medical processes improve health (i.e., the health production function); (2) providers must know more about the health production function than insurers do; and (3) health insurers must be able to measure a patient's risk-adjusted health. Only two of these conditions currently exist. Payers appear to have incomplete knowledge of the health production function, and providers appear to know more about the health production function than payers do, but accurate methods of adjusting the risk of a patient's health status are still being developed. Conclusions: This article concludes that in three general situations, P4P will have a different impact on quality and costs and so should be structured differently. When information about patients' health and the health production function is incomplete, as is currently the case, P4P payments should be kept small, should be based on outcomes rather than processes, and should target physicians' practices and health systems. As information improves, P4P incentive payments could be increased, and P4P may become more powerful. Ironically, once information becomes complete, P4P can be replaced entirely by "optimal fee-for-service." [source]

Executive Remuneration in Australia

AUSTRALIAN ACCOUNTING REVIEW, Issue 1 2010
Allan Fels
A fierce debate is raging about the legitimacy of executive pay rises. Australia's chief executive salaries are not as high as in the United States and the big European economies, but between 1993 and 2007 there was a sharp rise in remuneration. Most of the rise came in the form of incentive payments. In the Australian context, the size of the executive salary is closely linked with the size of the company. The evidence is mixed about how efficient executive remuneration has been, but what is clear is that the responsibility to ensure it is appropriate resides with boards, and that there is a need for greater shareholder participation. Accordingly, it is recommended that shareholders have a greater ,say on pay', and that two successive ,no' votes on remuneration by shareholders will have formal consequences for boards. The challenge is to improve agency between shareholders and management, and between shareholders and boards. An evolutionary approach is proposed. [source]