Arizona State and Local Government Documents Collection

The Office of the Auditor General is a legislative agency under the direction of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. The Office provides information to the Legislature and various other governmental entities, which assists them in overseeing operations, improving their financial management and effectiveness, and giving the public a measure of accountability.

The Department of Environmental Quality is responsible for ensuring that owners and operators of petroleum underground storage tanks comply with federal and state financial responsibility requirements. These requirements help ensure that UST owners and operators can pay to clean up leaks and spills and compensate third parties for bodily injury and any property damage incurred. Sites and/or operators of petroleum USTs include service stations, convenience stores, and local governments. The Department continues to fail to ensure that UST owners and operators meet financial responsibility requirements. Although the Department has begun to take steps to identify and address some of the weaknesses with its financial responsibility program, it should take additional steps, including developing policies and procedures to ensure UST owners and operators comply with financial responsibility requirements.

The theory of factor market distortions deals largely with taxing inputs. However, input subsidies are not only common in manufacturing. For example, U.S. agriculture is heavily dependent on input subsidies.
If water subsidies in the production of California cotton were removed, along with commodity payments, production of cotton in California would likely cease. Likewise, transportation subsidies were common in both the U.S. and Canada, and still prevail in the U.S.

The economic theories of New Institutional Economics, auctions, and welfare economics are used to analyze the potential for E-Commerce as an institution within the agricultural sector. We discuss the theory of the firm within the NIE paradigm and focus on the potential for E-Commerce to reduce transaction costs, search costs, and the costs associated with buying and selling livestock under various auction formats. We develop a theoretical model that captures the effect of Internet feeder-cattle auctions on Florida’s cattle market at three different levels in the marketing channel. We discuss the institutional arrangements and marketing mechanisms associated with the marketing of stocker and feeder cattle in Florida. We present the results of a survey distributed to cattle producers in North Florida regarding herd size, direct transaction costs of marketing cattle, and the implications of internet technology. Finally, we perform an empirical welfare analysis in order to estimate the impact of reduced transaction costs associated with Internet and video livestock auctions on cow-calf operators and backgrounders in Florida.

We investigate the underlying reasons for producers’ choice of marketing channels for stocker cattle in the United States. In addition to traditional public auctions, private sales, video auctions, and Internet auctions have been recently used in the marketing of stocker cattle. We find that while the number of marketing options may have increased in recent years, only relatively large producers can actually take advantage of these options. The marketing options for smaller producers are still limited due to their relative size. We also find that the number of cattle marketed privately and through video and Internet auctions is positively correlated with herd size. In addition, the New Institutional Economics provides insights into how herd size influences the choice of marketing channels.