Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

Using a 2007–2014 panel of Austrian crop farms, we analyse the effect of multiple dimensions of land fragmentation on farms' production efficiency and risk performance. We use data envelopment analysis (DEA), a non-parametric linear programming approach, to estimate efficiencies. Technical efficiency is decomposed into (i) scale efficiency, (ii) pure technical efficiency and (iii) input-mix efficiency. Risk efficiency, a concept borrowed from modern portfolio theory, measures the performance of a farm relative to a mean–variance frontier. A second-stage DEA analysis reveals that farms with fewer plots and a shorter average farmstead to plot distance tend to be more technically efficient. Larger plots allow for better exploitation of returns to scale. The scattering of plots has no statistically significant effect on technical efficiency but provides benefits in terms of higher risk efficiency. Land consolidation projects should carefully weigh the costs and benefits associated with different dimensions of land fragmentation.

Agricultural production is the main driver of nitrogen pollution and diversity loss. This study assesses the potential of cropland reallocation to simultaneously increase production and decrease nitrogen balances, and its impact on crop diversity. Our technological specification extends the by-production approach by dynamically modelling the impact of the N balance from the previous year on current year crop production. We use a robust order-m data envelopment analysis to estimate the production frontier, and the Hill-Shannon index to assess crop diversity before and after optimal cropland reallocation. The application uses Farm Business Survey data from farms in England and Wales between 2015 and 2019. The results show that efficiency gains would have increased crop production by GBP 10.31 per ha and decreased the nitrogen balance by 1.05 kg per ha, when compared with a business-as-usual scenario. Reallocation, only focusing on increasing production, would have increased crop production by GBP 83.74 per hectare and reduced the nitrogen balance by 2.01 kg per ha. Reallocation, focusing on increasing production and decreasing the nitrogen balance, would have increased the former by GBP 71.88 per hectare and reduced the latter by 4.99 kg per ha. The median cropland diversity increases by approximately 0.24 species per farm in both reallocation scenarios. Our results suggest that farmers can simultaneously improve economic and environmental performance, which would increase crop diversity. Effective policies should address barriers to diversification and foster management practices that both increase production and decrease nitrogen balances.

Country-specific variations in food standards often reflect national regulatory traditions, but they also disrupt trade by increasing associated costs and limiting market access. Aligning such standards between countries should reduce or eliminate the additional market access costs and enhance trade. Yet, whereas evidence abounds on the trade effects of country-specific public mandatory food standards, relatively little is known about the trade effects of regulatory homogeneity across countries. Exploiting the EU–Swiss trade relationship and data on maximum residue limits (MRLs) for pesticides, we assess the channels that explain the effects of regulatory homogeneity of standards on agri-food imports. Estimating a reduced-form gravity model, we find that similarity in Swiss-EU MRLs on a product-pesticide pair increases Swiss product-level imports from the EU by 10%. This consists of a 7.7% increase in the average import value per product per firm, a 1.4% increase in the number of product varieties imported and a 0.6% increase in the number of importing firms. Regulatory homogeneity also increases import volumes by 9.4% and decreases import prices by 1.6%. Accounting for firm heterogeneity, we find more pronounced trade effects for smaller firms. These findings are confirmed in firm-product level estimations, where we also find that the import-enhancing effects increase with increasing regulatory heterogeneity. Our results imply that even with mutual recognition, there remains a preference for imports that align with domestic standards. In terms of policy implications, our findings show that regulatory homogeneity enhances food security by increasing product variety and lowering prices.

Agri-food systems are transforming quickly in Africa. An important issue in the transformation process of agricultural production is the role of small farms. While many authors have looked at this question, one aspect that has received little attention is the role of small farms in the production of nutritious foods, an important topic given the low availability and relatively high prices of nutritious foods and the consequent low level of nutrition security in the continent. Using a unique large-scale dataset from Ethiopia—one of the largest countries in Africa that has been transforming rapidly—we look at the production of vegetables and dairy products. We find a strong association between farm size and partial productivity measured in terms of output, value of outputs and profit per hectare/cow, with productivity twice to four times as high for larger farms. These farms have substantially higher input expenditures as well as differences in farm technologies compared to small ones. Our findings have important implications for the debate on the role of small farms and nutritional improvements in the continent.

To meet their climate policy obligations towards the EU, some EU member states will have to adopt strict climate policies towards agriculture. Responding to this need, the Danish parliament recently decided to impose a tax on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the country's livestock production. We develop a simple model of primary agriculture and its interaction with the food industry to illustrate the main economic mechanisms determining the impact of a unilateral tax on GHG emissions from domestic agriculture. To study the allocation effects of the GHG tax on agriculture and the impact on the wider economy over time, we then present a disaggregated dynamic simulation model of Danish agriculture, embedded in a large-scale computable general equilibrium model. The model predicts that a large share of the cost increase induced by the tax will be shifted forward onto higher input prices in the food industry and ultimately onto consumers via higher food prices, but landowners will also bear a significant part of the burden through a fall in land prices. The GHG tax will induce a reallocation from animal to plant production, which would be even more pronounced in the case of a livestock-specific tax as currently foreseen, and from conventional to organic farming. This will help to reduce the total emissions from agriculture, but the largest share of the emission cuts will stem from a fall in output, as there are still few low-cost technical abatement possibilities in agriculture.

In this study, we assess the effect of the European Union's novel food regulations on firms' incentives to invest in such products. We adopt a conceptual framework based on real option value theory, which underpins an empirical analysis of a detailed dataset comprising 326 applications submitted under both the 1997 EU novel food regulation and its 2018 replacement. We investigate the dynamics of novel food applications under these regulations and disentangle the determinants of successful cases. Our results show a relatively stable number of applications over the years, with a spike after the introduction of the 2018 regulation, which sought to simplify and centralise the approval process. This upsurge can be interpreted as a reduction in the real option value of postponing investments, attributable to the introduction of a transitional regime and of 5-year data protection measures. However, the new regulation did not shorten the authorisation process, with the expected benefits of centralisation compromised by operational bottlenecks and a lower chance of approval. Finally, we find that approvals under the 2018 regulation are more likely when applicants are private entities from non-EU countries and have substantial experience with novel foods. Our empirical evidence suggests that the new regulation may be insufficient to speed up and streamline the novel food assessment process, which is inevitably constrained by EU food safety principles. This, in turn, may discourage future investments.

Limiting the impact of climate change on agriculture is a major goal of the European Union. This requires the evaluation of farm-level adaptation measures, available within the Common Agricultural Policy. We investigate how the adoption of soil conservation measures by farms in Austrian arable regions affects their economic performance. By applying an endogenous switching regression model to panel data, we find that climatic conditions significantly influence the decision on whether to adopt soil conservation measures. The net revenue of adopters is less sensitive to long-term temperature and precipitation changes than for non-adopters. The measures are profitable for a majority of farms. However, profitability is linked to baseline climatic conditions, with negative effects in cool, wet regions and significantly greater positive effects in warm, dry regions.

In light of the urgent need for farms to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining economic viability, this paper analyses technical and environmental inefficiencies and their determinants based on a flexible multi-equation by-production stochastic frontier model, which accounts for the stochastic dependence between good and bad outputs via a copula function. An empirical application to Dutch dairy farms illustrates the distortions in the inefficiency scores and in the estimates of their determinants that occur when the dependence between good and bad outputs is ignored. The empirical results indicate a strong positive dependence between the good output (milk) and the bad output (methane emissions), which is particularly pronounced in the upper tail of the distribution. Notably, farms exhibit high efficiency in maximising their good output and minimising their bad output. Subsidies are negatively related to good output inefficiency but positively related to bad output inefficiency, while stock density exhibits a negative association with inefficiencies in both outputs. Disregarding output dependence leads to distortions in inefficiency estimates, particularly affecting the estimates for their determinants.

Rainfall index insurance can enable farm households to manage production risk, but demand in developing countries remains low at market prices, in part because the insurance trigger may not correlate well with individual farm losses. Area-yield crop insurance, which links payouts to average yield in a geographic zone, attempts to increase demand by more accurately targeting insurance payouts to production shortfalls. However, shifting from an exogenous weather-based to an endogenous yield-based index introduces concerns of asymmetric information, which can lead to market failures that constrain supply from providers. These features are inversely related: larger insurance zones inhibit index manipulation, but average yield is less informative about any individual plot. We quantify this tradeoff for maize in Ghana using a spatial yield model calibrated to match observed production. Insurers must demarcate zones of no more than 5000 farmers for area-yield insurance to outperform weather insurance. The framework presented in this paper allows assessment of the relationship between index performance and asymmetric information in new crop insurance products.