Agricultural Economics最新文献

Using panel data on a statistically representative sample of Iowa farmland parcels from 1997 to 2017, we analyze the factors determining whether land is farmed by the owner or rented out under a cash rent or crop share contract. The landowner's decision to rent or operate the land depends on the distribution of expected net returns to the land, and so estimates of the factors affecting rental terms will be biased if the sample only includes rental contracts and excludes the owner-operator. Land with higher mean and/or lower variance of expected net returns is most likely to be rented out. Participants in the rental market will include the most risk-averse landowners and the least risk-averse tenants, while the least risk-averse landowners operate their own land. Our empirical results suggest that the rising use of cash rent contracts and declining incidence of owner-operation and crop-share rental contracts is consistent with falling coefficient of variation in expected net returns per acre.

Modern cooling technologies that utilize renewable energy sources have been increasingly recognized as promising tools to address various challenges emerging in progressively complex agrifood systems in developing countries. Knowledge gaps about the actual impacts of these technologies in developing countries remain, especially in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA). This study fills this knowledge gap by providing evidence from the evaluation of recent interventions in northeast Nigeria in which seven small solar-powered cold storages were installed across seven horticulture markets. Combinations of difference-in-difference (DID) and variants of propensity-score-based methods suggest that cold storage significantly increased horticulture sales volumes and revenues of market agents. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that increased net revenues for market agents may be sufficiently large to recoup cold storage investments and operating costs within a reasonable time frame. Using cold storage also reduced the share of food loss. It lengthened the products' shelf-life while raising prices received by market agents and farmers, which were associated with improved product quality, expanded value-adding activities by market agents, and increased use of advance payments.

Dealing with weather extremes is a major challenge for farmers and often comes at high costs for public budgets. Therefore, we investigate the influence of specific simplified decision rules, so-called heuristics, on farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for protecting themselves against low-probability and high-consequence weather shocks. To this end, we conducted a framed field experiment with 237 farmers in Germany, using incentivized lottery-based multiple price lists. We explored the effects of different heuristics within the prospect theory framework. Our results indicate that, on average, farmers exhibit risk-loving behavior towards monetary losses, leading to a low WTP for risk mitigation. The results also suggest that the imitation heuristic, shock experience heuristics, and the threshold of concern heuristic influence farmers’ WTP. Farmers specifically imitate successful farmers when these are risk-loving. The lack of personal experience with low-probability events induces farmers to assign less weight to low-probability shocks, which lowers their WTP. Farmers also systematically assign less weight to low-probability shocks that they consider “too rare to be concerned about.” Accounting for the use of these heuristics can help design improved risk management instruments and policies.

We investigate the spillover effects in farmers’ adoption decisions of a novel pesticide-free wheat production system. To this end, we exploit the variability and asymmetry in the social ties among neighboring farmers. We find evidence of spillover effects in farmers’ adoption decisions as well as in farm and farmer characteristics. Our results further highlight the importance of accounting for potentially heterogeneous social ties in farmer networks beyond pure measures of spatial proximity: spillover effects are only robust once we account for the strength of social ties through farmers’ stated tendency to consult peers on agricultural decisions. Our findings highlight the relevance of peer influence in the diffusion of sustainable agriculture practices even in contexts of well-functioned institutions and high interest in environmental protection such as European agriculture. We discuss implications for the design of policies and programs for sustainable agriculture, which are currently in the center of attention in agricultural policymaking.

Many researchers, policy makers, and food activists view Short Food Supply Chains (SFSC) as attractive levers for improving farm income and the sustainability of farming systems. However, the empirical evidence documenting the association between SFSC participation and farm economic performance has been mixed. In this study, through a meta-analysis using a logistic regression, we identify key factors to explain differences between studies that find better economic performance in SFSC and those that do not. Our meta-analysis consists of 48 studies published in English and French from 2000 to 2022 that examine the economic performance of farms engaged in SFSC. Based on far more empirical evidence than previous reviews, we find that the relationship between SFSC participation and farmer income remains ambiguous. More specifically the findings indicate that the reported effect of SFSC on a farm economic performance varies depending on location and the indicator used to capture the economic performance of farms. Studies conducted in Europe are more likely to report higher farmer income as are studies that use profit satisfaction metrics rather than measures of gross or net income. We also emphasize the need to interpret the reported results cautiously because few are based on causal inference methods. Furthermore, the very few studies that account for selection bias often do so with inadequate corrections.

This study investigates consumer preferences for newly introduced gene-edited (GE) food. We focus on how risk and ambiguity aversion affect consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid genetically modified (GM) food or GE food and whether the impacts of risk and ambiguity aversion differ between GM and GE food. We collected the data in 2020 through a nationwide online survey in China. The multiple price list method is used to estimate the premiums that consumers are willing to pay for conventional rice to avoid GM/GE rice. Our results show that Chinese urban consumers are more concerned about the health, environmental, and ethical impacts of genetic modification than gene editing technology. They are willing to pay lower premiums when the alternative is GE rice than when it is GM rice. We further find that both risk aversion and ambiguity aversion have significant negative impacts on respondents’ WTP for food derived from gene technologies, with ambiguity aversion being more influential than risk aversion for both GM and GE rice. However, there is no significant difference in how risk aversion and ambiguity aversion affect the respondents’ WTP to avoid GM or GE rice.

This study estimates the distributional heterogeneity in the effects of climate change on yields of three major cereal crops: rice, maize, and wheat in India using district-level information for the period 1966–2015. We distinguish between the effects of changes in growing season weather from those due to changes in long-term climate trends and the heterogeneity in these effects across the distribution of crop yields by estimating naïve and climate penalty inclusive models using fixed-effect quantile panel models. We observe an absence of adaptation against rising temperatures for rice and wheat. However, we find a statistically significant presence of adaptation for wheat and maize for changes in precipitation, though the magnitude is small. Moreover, we find that the effects are asymmetric, and are larger at the lower tail of productivity distribution and smaller at the upper tail of the distribution. A 1°C increase in temperature lowers rice and wheat productivity by 23% and 9%, respectively at the first quantile, but the damage is only 6% and 5% at the ninth quantile. Heterogeneity in impacts and adaptation estimates over the yield distribution curve and across crops suggests the importance of customizing strategies for adaptation to changing weather and climate conditions across regions, crops, and current productivity levels.

Despite the government spending significant amounts on fertilizer subsidies, Nepal's average fertilizer application rate is lower than in other South Asian countries. The low application is attributed to poor access to fertilizer and an inefficient distribution system. The government of Nepal issued a “Fertilizer Distribution Directive (FDD) 2020” to improve the distribution system. We assessed the impacts of involving the private sector in selling fertilizer to farmers. We examined whether the market transaction cost proxied by farmers’ search cost (communication and travel cost), travel time to visit the stores, and the opportunity cost of time spent in purchasing fertilizer have been reduced by FDD 2020. A difference-in-difference approach refined with propensity score matching was used to estimate the fertilizer distribution efficiency using survey data from 619 households across six districts. Private sector involvement was found to reduce travel time to fertilizer retailers by about 10 min and transaction costs to purchase subsidized fertilizer by about 20 Nepalese Rupees (NPR) per season, compared to the conventional approach of sale by farmer cooperatives. Implementation of the directive has removed the bias of cooperatives selling fertilizer only to members, especially medium and large-scale farmers. The directive and private sector involvement have led to a more equitable and efficient distribution of subsidized fertilizer. However, the government should routinely monitor and regulate the fertilizer mainly targeted to the private fertilizer retailers.

A competitive environment, highly concentrated processing and retailing sectors as well as increasing decoupling of direct payments from production volumes and the area under cultivation incentivizes farmers to find alternative ways to improve their bargaining position towards downstream companies. This article explores the possibilities of organic agriculture to enhance the bargaining power of farmers along with the role of concentration in downstream industries. Using a dataset with more than 200,000 observations from approximately 40,000 dairy farms, I estimate markups of price over marginal cost in dairy farming as a measure of market power in the EU. The results show that organic farmers achieve a significant markup premium over conventional farmers. With increasing market shares of organic milk in total milk production markups of conventional farmers diminish whereas those of organic farmers are unaffected. Farm-level markups decrease with increasing market shares of medium-sized dairy processors and increase with increasing market shares of large processors. The presence of large multinational retail chains shows an adverse impact on farmers’ markups.

In spite of important differences in their agricultural sectors, the past century has seen a significant decline in the number of people employed in agriculture in the U.S. and Japan. Economic models of intersectoral labor migration focus on expected return differentials as the primary cause of migration from one sector to another. Empirical applications typically assume that migration occurs as soon as the return differential exceeds Marshallian migration costs, but recent work has focused on embedding the migration decision in a real options framework. Structural and institutional elements can also affect the speed at which the share of agricultural labor declines. We consider the factors influencing intersectoral labor migration in the U.S. and Japan using aggregate migration equations and several definitions of agricultural labor and return differentials. We show that real options, although relevant at the household level, have limited implications for sector-level empirical models. Our estimates are inconclusive regarding the importance of the Marshallian trigger in the migration decision, with heterogeneity across the two countries and labor definitions. We argue that this heterogeneity in the wage and migration relationship is driven by differences in the structures of the agricultural sectors.