The importation of apples into Japan was first allowed in 1971. However, the lack of certain diseases and insects in Japan resulted in the enforcement of phytosanitary regulations that effectively kept foreign apples out of the market until 1993. Recently, protocols have been established that now allow some imported apples from New Zealand and the U.S. However, since Japanese consumers are less familiar with some of the varieties that can now be imported, there was little demand for the imported varieties. Hence traditional demand analyses utilizing price, quantity and other economic variables may not provide an appropriate estimate of the likely market impact of imported apples.
　The purpose of this analysis was to determine which apple characteristics could be used to explain the variation in prices observed in the Tokyo Wholesale Market. The results of this analysis can then be used to estimate appropriate price levels of imported apples in comparison with Japanese varieties. In this analysis, a hedonic approach is used to estimate a price-dependent demand model.
　The analysis shows that wholesale prices for apples in Japan are very much associated with the brix, brix/acid balance and juice content. The extent to which the brix/acid balance was entered in the analysis indicates that apples that either tend to be tart (high acid, low sugar) or very sweet (high sugar, low acid) may not be acceptable to many Japanese consumers.
　In the final analysis, the current prices and quality of apples imported from New Zealand and the U.S. do not make them competitive with Japanese apples. Thus it is necessary to improve the quality and lower the price of these foreign apples in order to gain popularity among Japanese consumers.

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　The spread of Green Revolution technology has nourished new transactions of production factors, such as irrigation water pumped up by private tubewells in South Asia. It is imperative both for analytical and policy purposes to understand the nature of these transactions in terms of their efficiency and equity. In his important paper on groundwater markets in Bangladesh, K. Fujita showed that the distribution of economic surplus is consistent with the opportunity costs of production factors in villages in that country. This paper proposes an analytical model that explains his findings in a theoretically consistent way and allows a more general relationship between efficiency and equity than the monopoly or competitive equilibrium models.
　Three types of water transactions, i.e., land leased by the tubewell owner from the non-owner, water sales at a fixed price, and water sales on a sharecropping basis, were investigated with due attention paid to the nature of the transaction as a face-to-face contract between a tubewell owner and a non-owner. Major findings were as follows. First, an orthodox monopoly model predicts different levels of efficiency among the three transaction forms so it cannot explain their coexistence satisfactorily. Second, a principal-agent model can be applied to show the possibility that the three forms are equally efficient in resource allocation. Third, the agency model can be generalized into bargaining models that allow a flexible pattern of surplus distribution, keeping the efficiency characteristic intact. This model is able to explain the observations in Bangladesh in a theoretically consistent way. Fourth, by combining the implications of various models, the efficiency of water transactions can be analyzed in a more flexible way.

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