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not justified by their usage. Interestingly, the study concluded that there did not appear to be any relationship between the utilization rate and the quality of the ASA effort. (10).
The general purpose of this paper is to consider some issues and constraints relating to the process of using ASA as an operational piece in the on-going policy decision making process of a developing countries host institution. We shall attempt to elaborate from our experience what some of the constraints .on the institutionalization of ASA techniques appear to be and to introduce some notions on how ASA efforts might be modified to alleviate or to better deal with these constraints. These issues are considered in light of (a) the generally competing need to maintain a sufficient degree of model or technique isomorphism so as to yield insights into the fundamental directional and magnitudional impacts of policy instruments on variables (activities) endogenous to the private sector, (b) the data, resource and human capital endowments upon which an ASA effort is based and constrained, and (c) the organizational structure of the institution hosting the effort and/or the institution in which the effort is based. For our purposes herewe accept the premise that sector models comprising at least some comprehensiveness and detail of the agricultural sector are useful policy formulation and evaluation tools, among other uses, and that they offer competitive alternatives to the sole use of other methods in many LDCs.
The plan of the paper is to first briefly, and non analytically,
describe the agricultural sector analysis framework developed in Tunisia