Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

The agglomeration bonus (AB) has been advocated as an incentive mechanism to boost spatially coordinated conservation efforts, where such coordination is thought to be beneficial to achieving biodiversity or other ecological outcomes. Specifically, an AB is paid to individual landholders if their conserved habitats are spatially connected to the conserved habitats of adjacent neighbours. This paper employs a series of controlled lab experiments with agriculture students to investigate the performance of AB in budget-constrained discriminatory-price auctions across different landscape types. We focus on the spatial correlation of opportunity costs and environmental benefits as one potentially important aspect of the landscape. We set up a stylised agricultural landscape where the conservation agency aims to connect fragmented wildlife habitats by incentivising farmers to enrol land in a conservation programme. We investigate the effects of an AB in landscapes where opportunity costs and environmental benefits are uncorrelated, negatively correlated or positively correlated over space. We found that the benefits of an AB in improving landscape-scale environmental outcomes were significant in the positive correlation landscape. However, the AB resulted in worse outcomes in the uncorrelated and negative landscapes.

Farmers' preferences toward practice- and results-based agri-environmental schemes (AES) are analysed using a labelled choice experiment. The analysis focuses on schemes involving an innovative satellite-based monitoring system, with different environmental objectives. Olive groves in southern Spain are used as a case study. Results show no statistically significant differences in farmers' willingness to accept (WTA) payment for participating in practice- versus results-based AES when the scheme targets carbon sequestration. By contrast, farmers require a significantly higher WTA payment for results-based AES when targeting biodiversity (using bird species as an indicator), mostly due to the uncertainties related to its provision and monitoring. WTA significantly increases with provision level and remote sensing monitoring, regardless of the type of scheme. Significant preference heterogeneity is observed, partly explained by farmers' attitudes toward risk and their beliefs about environmental service provision and monitoring capacity. The results suggest useful policy implications, including the potential of making use of joint provision of environmental services in the design of results-based AES and accompanying them with uncertainty mitigating measures.

Though tariffs have declined in recent years, the number of applied non-tariff measures (NTMs) in meat trade has expanded. We estimate the impacts of tariffs and NTMs (sanitary and phytosanitary [SPS] measures, technical barriers to trade [TBTs], quantitative restrictions, and special safeguard measures) on beef, pork and poultry trade using a structural gravity model. Our baseline regression results show tariffs hinder trade, but SPS measures and TBTs on average expand trade for these three meat products. Using the estimates from our structural gravity model, we simulate the differential effects of declining tariffs versus proliferation of NTMs between 2003 and 2019. The simulation results show that tariff reductions during this period expanded global trade by a cumulative US$466.2 million for the three products, ceteris paribus. In contrast, growth in the number of NTMs caused global meat trade to rise by US$8.4 billion. Our findings thus suggest that the marked increase in the number of applied NTMs in recent decades has had a dramatically larger impact on global meat trade than tariff reductions.

This paper examines the role of a ‘green’ value-added tax in the competitive environment of firms. Using data on firms in Romania and leveraging the introduction of a tax reduction on organic products in 2019, I show that although the overall market for organic goods grows and potential to generate windfall profit exists, the market share of incumbent firms decreases because of intensified competition post-reform driven by new entrants competing for profits in the market. The market share decreases by about 2 percentage points after the reform. The effect depends on the relative elasticity of demand vis-à-vis supply in the market and the ability of a firm to protect its sales from new market entrants. Firms operating geographically further from the main consumer (i.e., more rural firms) and further upstream from the retail sector are more vulnerable to losing market share because urban demand is less elastic than rural demand and retail demand is less elastic than primary demand. Firms that are in markets where it is easier to switch from non-organic to organic and that are less capital intensive (i.e., have fewer fixed costs) are more vulnerable to losing market share to new market entrants.

Basic economic logic, which often simplifies assessments and explanations of agricultural policy issues, is vitally important in communicating with policy-makers. Resources are limited, and there is a premium on getting decisions at least approximately right first time. Examples from southern Africa illustrate the importance of parity pricing, and its links to household food security (Lesotho), price risk, the emergence of an agricultural futures market, and its central role in allocating scarce agricultural resources (South Africa). Insights derived from an appreciation of parity pricing are relevant in other national contexts and also help explain how international grain markets operate. The parity pricing concept provides a framework for sense-checking complicated debates relating to two issues that have been prominent in recent years; first, whether and to what extent speculation in futures markets has been a driver of agricultural price spikes, and second, how far indirect land use change (ILUC), triggered by the use of agricultural feedstocks to produce renewable energy, is a material issue. These issues are likely to be of heightened importance in the face of climate change. Each emphasises that agricultural economics matters, and that it matters that we get the economics right.

Increasing agricultural productivity in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is an important channel for reducing poverty and food insecurity. Information and communication technologies (ICT) have the potential to boost agricultural productivity by lowering transaction costs and enhancing access to information. Even though there are several micro-level studies analysing the effects of ICT on agricultural productivity, there is scant research addressing the role of ICT in agricultural productivity at the global and regional levels. Using data from 86 countries for the period 2000 to 2019 and utilising a fixed effect panel regression with a feasible generalised least square approach, we find that globally there is a positive and significant association between ICT uptake and both land and labour productivity in agriculture. In each case, however, the magnitude of the effect is much smaller than other important determinants, such as human capital, access to inputs or environmental factors. At the regional level, the relationship between ICT uptake and land productivity is not significant in Africa and Asia, while we find a significant effect on labour productivity. This finding indicates that while ICT can provide valuable information and tools for land management, the effect on land productivity might be less immediate in these regions. Finally, we revisit the question of whether ICT expansion increases agricultural productivity gaps between high-income nations and LMICs. In contrast to previous research, this study does not find significant differences in the effects of ICT on land and labour productivity between higher-income and lower-income countries.

On retirement from the post of Editor in Chief of the JAE, it is appropriate that I offer some reflections on my editorship. First, I review the general performance of the journal over the period 2005-2023, and conclude that the JAE has held its own amongst our peers though this is is largely due to our authors and reviewers, rather than the Editor. Second, I consider the subject matter and citation scores of our published papers over this period, as a reflection of the evolution of the state of the art of the Agricultural Economics profession. Here, I illustrate the increasing number and subject/method range of published papers, but raise some questions about what, exactly, citations really indicate. I conclude with some reflections on the challenges and opportunities for the profession.

Ensuring that farmers' ex ante preferences are accounted for is crucial for the design of effective agri-environmental contracts. We present a systematic review of 127 discrete choice experiment (DCE) studies of farmers' preferences with respect to agri-environmental contracts. DCE studies evaluate two central features of farmers' behaviour: (1) their willingness to accept land use prescriptions, such as fertiliser use, application of pesticides, restrictions on cropping, livestock management, integration of silvopasture, maintaining soil health or water use restrictions; and (2) their responses to variations in incentive and commitment criteria, such as reward schemes, monitoring regimes, technical assistance, flexibility of agreements, administrative burden and collaborative implementation. Our analysis considers how these different elements are interlinked and applied in experiments to simulate farmers' decision-making processes. We examine recent methodological improvements in explaining farmer behaviour, including the accommodation of preference heterogeneity, the combining of discrete (enrolment) and continuous decisions, and the incorporation of farmers' sense of identity. DCEs have been applied for the ex ante analysis of different policy instruments to inform the European Common Agricultural Policy and agri-environmental schemes outside the EU. The results of this systematic review may be useful in informing the future design of such agri-environmental programmes. The database underpinning this systematic literature review may help peer scientists to (a) compare, validate and triangulate their own findings with respect to other experimental approaches, (b) use previous willingness-to-accept (WTA) measures as priors for their own study design, and (c) identify research gaps regarding farmers' preferences for agri-environmental measures.