Abstract
This is a model to study aspects of the short and long-range growth and balance between four world quantities: food, energy, fertilizer, and population. The model may be used as a tool to study implications of various policies for coordinated world planning. The model operates as follows: The world is subdivided into a number of regions. Consider time period t. In each region two factors, investments and population, are used to determine supplies of fertilizer, energy, arable acreage, and workforce availability. The regional investment stream is an exogenous input to the system. In each region, demand functions are specified for foods, fertilizer, energy for agriculture, energy for other uses, acreage, and labor. These demands are functions of all prices, population, and income in period t − 1. A spatial equilibrium model links all regions and determines equilibrium imports, exports, and prices for each region. This gives, for each region, the income in period t, and specific consumption of fertilizer, energy for agriculture, acreage, and workforce. Based on this consumption, and taking account of weather, regional agricultural outputs are determined. This provides an exogenous food supply for the spatial equilibrium model in year t + 1. The supplies in t + 1 of fertilizer, energy, acreage and labor are determined, as functions of population and the investment stream, and the procedure is repeated.
Since the writing of this material preliminary reports have been released on the MOIRA model of H. Linnemann and Associates. Because of this timing of circumstances it should be explicitly stated that this document was written prior to any knowledge of the Linnemann efforts and hence the latter must be excepted from any comments herein which refer to other works in global modeling.
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Gould, F.J. (1976). A four-variable world system. In: Cea, J. (eds) Optimization Techniques Modeling and Optimization in the Service of Man Part 1. Optimization Techniques 1975. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 40. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-07622-0_488
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-07622-0_488
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