Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

Agricultural insurance is a useful tool for managing risk, and many governments offer support to encourage farmers to participate. However, empirical analysis exploring the dynamic effects of participation in these schemes is limited. This study investigates the causal relationship between agricultural insurance participation and farm productivity, income and input usage over both the short and long terms. Using the Italian Farm Accountancy Data Network between 2018 and 2022, the study applies a difference-in-differences approach that allows assessment of the dynamic impact of insurance. The findings reveal that insurance participation has a persistent negative effect on farm income and productivity, particularly in the early years of participation. This decline suggests moral hazard behaviour, where insured farmers reduce entrepreneurial effort. However, no significant long-term changes were observed in fertiliser or crop protection usage, while usage increased immediately after insurance adoption but decreased in subsequent years. The results of this study suggest that while insurance is designed to mitigate income volatility during adverse events, it does not necessarily improve profitability or productivity because of reduced production incentives and higher insurance premium costs. The study highlights the policy challenge of designing agricultural insurance schemes that can improve risk management without weakening productivity growth.

Weak enforcement and power imbalances in developing-country contract farming can create opportunities for both farmers and processors to renege on agreements; a situation known as double moral hazard (DMH). Drawing on a principal–agent framework, we use a controlled laboratory experiment to compare DMH, where processors can reduce agreed-upon prices ex post and farmers can side-sell, to single moral hazard (SMH), where only farmers can deviate. Contrary to the standard theoretical prediction of identical outcomes under full rationality, allowing processors to lower prices ex post leads to significantly lower initial price offers, greater side-selling and reduced contract acceptance; ultimately harming farmers' earnings. By contrast, SMH produces higher prices and a Pareto improvement in welfare. These findings highlight how buyer opportunism, exacerbated by weak legal systems and asymmetrical bargaining power, can erode smallholders' livelihoods in practice. We conclude that policies and contract designs aimed at limiting buyer discretion can mitigate double moral hazard and enhance the stability and equity of contract farming arrangements.

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030) aims to prevent the degradation of ecosystems, such as grasslands, which play a key role in the provision of biodiversity, forage, and cultural ecosystem services. However, woody plant encroachment increasingly causes the loss of grasslands, which provide forage, are biodiversity hotspots, and are of high cultural value. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of agricultural policies in the form of farm subsidies on halting the loss of grasslands due to woody plant encroachment. To this end, we assemble a novel panel dataset that connects the farm-level census data of Swiss alpine summer farms and high-resolution remotely sensed woody plant encroachment data. To deal with the endogenous selection of claiming subsidies, we leverage an agricultural policy reform that abruptly and unevenly increased subsidies, allowing us to estimate the causal effect of subsidies at the farm level on woody plant encroachment. Our results show that an increase in subsidies causes a loss of 2% of grassland due to woody plant encroachment, which corresponds to an average loss of 4.7 ha of grassland per farm. Hence, our study highlights that the effect of subsidies can be complex and lead to unintended and not desired policy outcomes, which should be considered by policymakers.

The phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change is now well-established, with global temperatures in 2024 having already exceeded the Paris Agreement target ceiling of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (Copernicus 2025) and extreme weather events (EWEs) an increasing occurrence. EWEs—including flooding, extreme heat, drought and wildfires—have profound implications for agriculture (Burke et al. 2015; IPCC 2023; Tebaldi and Lobell 2018; Zhao et al. 2017).

There has been extensive research on how agriculture will need to adapt to climate change (e.g., Huang and Sim 2020), and how policies can facilitate that process, notably by building resilience (Lipper et al. 2018; Wreford et al. 2010). At the same time, agriculture will likely account for an increasing share of global emissions as other sectors decarbonise, and greater efforts will be needed to reduce sectoral emissions. The latter issue has been explored in recent papers in this journal (Kreft et al. 2023; Sørenson et al. 2025).

The impacts of EWEs have been a focus of analysis (e.g., Bezner Kerr et al. 2022; Fabri et al. 2024; Rosenzweig et al. 2001), but the international spill-over effects across markets have received comparatively little attention. Each of the four studies in this Special Focus uses partial equilibrium (PE) modelling to explore how the impacts of extreme weather shocks reverberate across markets. These models are combined with a range of approaches, including stochastic draws based on historic weather variation; Superposed Epoch Analysis; a Combined Stress Index; and a fixed-effects regression analysis on the relationship between weather and overlapping growing periods, to identify and simulate the effects of foreseeable “worst case” scenarios.

The strength of PE models is that they can capture critical interactions within the agricultural economy with a relatively high degree of disaggregation, a strength which for some inquiries outweighs the weakness of treating other sectors exogenously (a weakness addressed by general equilibrium analysis, e.g., Gouël and Laborde 2021). PE models are particularly useful for agricultural policy analysis, for example in assessing how producers and consumers respond to market shocks, and identifying policies that can be used to counter undesired impacts (such as high prices for consumers or suppressed farm incomes).

Each of the PE models used in this Special Focus has been developed by researchers representing some of the most notable institutions engaged in analysing agricultural policy and markets—the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); China Agricultural University (CAU) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Food