Agricultural Economics最新文献

This study investigates the impacts of China's South-to-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP) on agricultural production using city-level data from 2009 to 2019. Utilizing the Synthetic Control Difference-in-Differences method, we find heterogeneous impacts along the eastern and middle routes of the SNWTP. The operation of the eastern route increases agricultural output by 3.7%, primarily driven by an increase in fishery and aquaculture output. In contrast, the middle route decreases agricultural output by 10.8%, mainly due to the reduction in outputs of crop cultivation and animal husbandry. This unexpected decrease in agricultural output in the water-receiving cities along the middle route can be attributed to the stricter environmental regulations aimed at preserving the quality of the diverted water. The heterogenous effects of the SNWTP on agricultural production highlight the complex consequences of large-scale water infrastructure projects, underscoring the importance of incorporating environmental considerations into the evaluation of such initiatives.

This study examines the average and distributional effects of trade policy and friction variables on dairy trade flows. To capture average effects, we utilize the recently extended Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) methods, which rigorously address potential bias for coefficient and standard error estimates due to the incidental parameter problem in two-way and three-way gravity models. Additionally, we are among the first to apply a new distribution regression method to study counterfactual distributional effects in a two-way gravity model. Using PPML methods, we find that sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures hinder dairy trade, while technical barriers to trade (TBT) boost it on average. Findings show that the model specification with separate intranational and international distance variables better fits the dairy trade data than using a combined distance variable. Using the distribution regression method, we find that the effect of TBT is positive but statistically insignificant. In contrast, trade agreements exhibit positive and heterogeneous effects, particularly in the upper quantiles of dairy trade flows. Additionally, distance shows a strong negative heterogeneous impact on the upper quantiles of dairy trade flows. Our findings could guide policymakers in formulating trade policies to improve global dairy trade.

This paper examines the consequences of decentralization in the management of canal irrigation for spatial allocation of water and agricultural performance. Under centralized management, farmers closer to the canal tend to over-extract water, resulting in spatial misallocation. We test whether decentralization can improve spatial allocation of water by exploiting the differential timing of the constitution of locally elected canal management bodies (“Pani Panchayats”) in the state of Orissa, India, that decentralized its canal management. Using survey data and a heterogeneous treatment effect estimation strategy using farmer level fixed effects, we show that farming plots farther away from the canal received less water under centralized system, but longer exposure to decentralization significantly reduces spatial misallocation. Consequently, agricultural revenue and wealth (landholding) improve more for those farmers. The effect of decentralization is more pronounced in areas with high land inequality and lower in areas where plots are similarly sized across distance from canal. We find suggestive evidence that distant farmers’ ability to complain to local representatives is an important mechanism explaining our results.

Natural capital is a key element in the provision of soil ecosystem services (ES). However, most economic analyses of production lack an explicit integration of natural capital and its components. We develop a novel empirical approach that integrates soil natural capital into a multi-output production model using a distance function framework. By treating natural capital as a latent variable derived from biophysical soil indicators, we bridge the gap between stock-based and service-based approaches to ecosystem valuation, providing joint estimates of technical efficiency and ES provision in agriculture. Our empirical application uses data from a sample of farmers and detailed soil observations collected by the Observatoire Pérenne de l'Environnement (ANDRA, Grand-Est Region, France). We focus on two key ES provided by agricultural soils: biomass provision and climate regulation. Estimation results show that soil natural capital is a highly significant input in the distance function, and that omitting it leads to an underestimation of technical efficiency. We also find evidence of a trade-off between biomass production and climate regulation services.

Uncertainty in agricultural production often leads to excessive fertilizer use, a major contributor to agricultural non-point source pollution. This paper studies how farmers’ risk and ambiguity preferences impact their fertilizer use behaviors. We conduct the analysis based on a lab-in-the-field experiment in Taihu, China. The experiment results show that farmers are, on average, risk averse in the gain domain and risk seeking in the loss domain, while being ambiguity seeking in gains and ambiguity averse in losses. They tend to exhibit higher probability distortions—overweighting small probabilities and underweighting large probabilities—in ambiguous contexts. We find that ambiguity aversion has a stronger influence on chemical fertilizer use than risk aversion. Moreover, farmers who are reluctant to use organic fertilizers tend to underestimate the probability of potential benefits. Our results suggest that improving farmers’ cognitive ability could potentially reduce chemical fertilizer use, while increasing household income and expanding cropland size may facilitate the adoption of organic fertilizers.

The adoption of clean fuels has been associated with improvements in health and women's empowerment. However, the effects on women's labor market participation and family nutrition remain under-investigated. This study examines the impact of adopting clean fuels on rural women's labor market participation and family nutritional status using representative survey data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey. Our findings indicate that households’ use of clean fuels can promote female employment through two pathways as follows: improving health and reducing cooking time, which leads to an increase in their weekly labor supply by 0.9 days and daily working hours by nearly 1 h. Moreover, this gender-specific improvement in employment can more effectively enhance women's role in promoting household nutrition, as indicated by more diverse dietary patterns and higher protein intake. This study highlights a novel perspective that integrates domestic energy transition into broader sustainable development goals, particularly those related to health, nutrition, and gender equality.