The conference looked beyond the juvenile justice system proper to examine the roots and potential solutions to the over representation of minority youth in Arizona’s juvenile justice system. Through this important undertaking and the dedication of the Commission on Minorities, Arizona demonstrated once again its important role as a leader in shaping the future of the juvenile justice system.

Shortly after selecting Judge Roxanne Song Ong as Commission Chair and reconstituting its membership, Chief Justice McGregor directed the Commission to develop a strategic plan with projects that seek to enhance fairness and equity in the judiciary and present a report at the December 2006 meeting of the Arizona Judicial Council.

This report represent the efforts of the Commission since its reactivation under a new mandate in May of 1994. The goal of this work group is to develop policies and programs that will facilitate the growth of minority applicants seeking appointments as judges, commissioners, judges pro tempore, special masters, clerkships, and internships.

This report is a result of the "2002 Equitable Treatment of Minority Youth" report produced by the Arizona Supreme Court Commission on Minorities in the Judiciary. One of the recommendations issued in that report was to create an annual report card to assess progress on the reduction of over-representation of minority youth in the juvenile justice system. The decision has been modified to produce a report card every other year. The first report serves as a baseline for the second, third and fourth report cards. The intent is to illustrate the current situation, provide a basis for future comparison, highlight areas of special concern and compare these results with the prior report card.

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.

Contains a dynamic programming algorithm for projecting policy parameters based on a storage model of international markets featuring uncertainty, forward-looking rational expectations and non-negative storage. This algorithm is motivated by the need for a non-analytical solution to the competitive equilibrium in a storage model of U.S. and foreign cotton policy regimes. Obtaining an analytical solution is difficult, except in a limited number of special cases. The numerical solution algorithm essentially consists of multiple nested numerical approximations that reach convergence simultaneously when the relationship between domestic storage and expected farm price achieves stationarity. Given the stationary relationship between storage and expected farm price, we then run the model forward in time (given a sequence of annual realized yield disturbances) under alternative policy regimes representing FACT and FAIR.

This paper provides a methodology that can be used to weigh the costs and benefits of precision agriculture in the measurement and application of variable-rate production technology. Empirical estimates of the economic value of precision farming in the form of variable-rate fertilizer application to corn fields in the mid-western United States are calculated and compared to the current cost of investing in this technology. The results of this study indicate that the use of precision technology in the application of fertilizer for corn production in the United States is not profitable over a relatively wide range of corn prices, nitrogen prices, and agronomic differences in soil characteristics.

In 1995/96, the government of Turkey imposed an export tax of 20 cents/kg on Aegean cotton and an ad-valorem import duty of one percent on non-aegean cotton. The simulation results for the Aegean market indicate that consumers gained $44.5 million in consumer surplus because the export tax reduced the purchase price of Aegean cotton. The Turkish government extracted export tax revenue equal to $11.6 million, but provided water, fertilizer, and credit subsidies equal to $22.2 million. Producers lost $35 million in producer surplus due to the lower domestic price caused by the export tax. However, while these numbers represent large transfers from producers to consumers, the net inefficiency due to government distortions amount to only $1.14 million in the Aegean market. Adding this number to the dead-weight loss of only $790,000 obtained from the non-Aegean market simulation, the net inefficiency caused by government intervention in Turkish raw cotton markets was only $1.93 million in 1995/96. If one considers that cotton producers in Turkey realized gross revenue of over $1.4 billion across all markets in 1995/96, the results of the analysis seems to indicate that the income transfer associated with Turkish government programs is not very inefficient.