Agricultural Economics最新文献

Geographical Indication (GI) is a rising policy in developing countries, which has been relatively neglected in the existing literature. This article studies Chinese agricultural GIs and its impact on firms’ exports. By relating newly authorized GIs with firm-product-location-destination level customs trade data according to GIs’ geographical coverage and product type, we estimate the impact of these new GIs on firm's exports. Importantly, we can distinguish GIs with and without quality supervision. For the latter we find negative impacts on export quality, which is not the case for GIs with quality supervision. We interpret this in the context of our theoretical framework as evidence for quality free-riding, where individual firms have an incentive to lower the quality of the export product. We show that this negative effect is less, the more concentrated an industry is or the more GIs there are for a particular product. Furthermore, our results suggest that the China-EU agreement on Geographical Indications may play the role of quality supervision and prevent the possibility of free-riding.

Disease outbreaks are one of the major issues in the aquaculture sector and can lead to significant economic losses. Although the source of the disease is difficult to trace, understanding how it occurs is important to mitigate the problem. A crucial factor that has not received sufficient attention is the presence of spillovers among fish farmers connected by waterways. This study examines the presence of spillovers among shrimp farmers in Southern Vietnam based on primary data. In particular, it quantifies the effects of contaminated water spillovers from one farm to another and the peer effects of farming practices among neighbors. We solve the reflection problem by employing a method developed in social network analyses. The findings indicate that a farmer's practices are affected by their neighbors’ farming practices. Further, the disease outbreak in a farmer's pond is affected by those in their neighbors’ ponds, even after controlling for contextual peer effects and correlated effects. The negative effects of neighbors’ ponds on the probability of disease outbreaks in a farmer's pond may offset the positive effects of the farmer's good farming practices, suggesting the importance of considering neighboring farmers as a group when addressing the issue of disease control.

Climate change poses a significant threat to agriculture and challenges farmers’ adaptive capacity. Understanding how farmers evaluate and prioritize different climate change adaptation measures under consideration of their natural environment is crucial yet widely overlooked. This study determines the relative importance that farmers attach to different adaptation measures and explores the role of climatic and soil conditions in this context. It uses a best-worst scaling experiment with German arable farmers in combination with geospatial climate and soil information. Findings reveal a preference for incremental adaptation measures over more transformative ones. However, preferences varied considerably with average local temperature, precipitation, and soil quality. The finding that farmers’ adaptation preferences are highly diverse and context-specific calls for tailored policies. It is crucial for policymakers to have a thorough understanding of farmers’ adaptation preferences. Based on the results, the study discusses multiple actions that policymakers can take to incentivize farmers to favor more effective adaptation measures.

Using a unique panel dataset based on two census rounds, we estimate the impact of irrigation gaps and drought on yields of paddy, maize, and other crops in Bhutan, an understudied country. We utilize a recently-developed spatial first differences (SFD) approach to identify the impacts of water-related constraints and compare these results from a panel fixed effects (FE) approach. We find that irrigation gaps reduce paddy yields and droughts reduce maize yields. Estimates from the SFD model are found to be consistent compared to those from the panel FE model. Water-related constraints also reduce yields of vegetable crops, and other constraints such as labor shortages, wild animals, insects, and diseases reduce yields of cereal crops.

Increasing smallholders market participation is acknowledged as an important step towards greater rural prosperity in developing countries. While existing literature identifies high transaction costs and market imperfections as challenges faced by smallholders in accessing agricultural markets, less attention has been paid to the role of constraints to the production of a marketable surplus. Specifically, there is a dearth of empirical evidence about how liquidity constraints during the production period that limit smallholders’ investments in agricultural inputs can affect agricultural production and subsequently their market participation and choice of marketing channel. We explore this issue in the context of the Zambian maize market during a period when the country's parastatal marketing board – the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) – operated alongside private buyers and purchased large volumes of maize at a pan-territorial price that exceeded average market prices. Although we cannot definitively identify causal effects, we find strong and robust associations indicating that smallholder maize-growing households who were liquidity-constrained during the production period harvested less maize, were less likely to sell maize, and were less likely to sell to the FRA, as compared to those who were unconstrained. Liquidity constraints during the production period likely exacerbate the already disproportionate capture of FRA benefits by wealthier farmers.

New agricultural technologies, such as stress-tolerant rice varieties (STRVs), that reduce yield risk can modify farmers’ production decisions. This article explores how STRV adoption affects farmer decision-making and productivity in Nepal in a non-drought year. STRVs are bred to be high-yielding and tolerant to climate shocks such as drought. To assess the effect of input measurements on treatment effects, we collected information from 900 households on STRV adoption and input use. We also conducted a survey experiment in which half of sampled households were randomly assigned to answer additional, more detailed questions on agricultural inputs. Farmers apply more total chemical fertilizer, pesticides, early-season chemical fertilizer, and land preparation labor to plots planted with STRVs compared to traditional varieties (TVs). Detailed input data enhances our understanding of how this “crowding-in” effect of STRV adoption on input use compares with other high-yielding varieties. While farmers increase application of a subset of these inputs on other improved variety types such as hybrids, results suggest that crowd-in effects are most consistent for STRVs. In the absence of drought, STRVs also provide a similar yield boost and yield variance reduction over TVs compared to other, non-stress tolerant improved varieties. Results suggest that improved varietal adoption, and STRV adoption in particular, can improve household productivity and modernization of agriculture.

The shift of industrial water pollution from urban to rural areas during industrialization can impact agricultural production and stimulate farmers’ adaptive behavior. As an illustration, this study examines the impact of industrial water pollution from manufacturing firms on rice production in Jiangsu, China. By combining data from the China Rural Fixed Point Survey with the China Environmental Statistics Database, we employ an extended translog production function to distinguish between the effects of industrial water pollution and farmers’ adaptation behaviors. Our results demonstrate that industrial chemical oxygen demand (COD) has a direct biological effect on paddy rice growth, reducing rice yields by 3.76 to 4.17 percent. This detrimental effect is most pronounced within a radius of 5 kg from the village center. Additionally, farmers increase their operating inputs to mitigate the adverse effects of industrial water pollution. These findings underscore the need for stringent environmental regulations and enhanced environmental education in rural areas to promote the sustainable development of both manufacturing industry and agriculture in developing countries.

This study investigates the determinants of farmers’ risk management decisions in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, using a recursive multivariate probit (RMVP) model. Employing data from 382 farmers collected through a multistage sampling process, the study compares the RMVP with the traditional multivariate probit (MVP) model, demonstrating the superior performance of the RMVP in capturing complex decision-making patterns. Our rigorous statistical analysis demonstrates the significant impact of endogenous covariates on farmers’ risk management choices, revealing complementarity or substitutability among strategies. The study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the effectiveness of the RMVP model for understanding smallholder farmers’ risk management behavior and offering insights for policymakers to support resilient agricultural systems.

Diversification of income sources is one of the most common strategies households employ to minimize household income variability and to ensure a minimum level of income that guarantee their food security. This study examines the impact of livelihood diversification on farm profits among smallholder rice farmers in the Central Luzon Region (CLR) of the Philippines using long-term farm-level panel data spanning from 1966 to 2016. We employed a random-effects ordered probit model to investigate the drivers of livelihood diversification and then used the mixed Markov chain model to analyze the transition of households from less to more diversified livelihoods and its impact on farm profits over time. Our findings reveal substantial diversification among households over time. In particular, the elevation of the farm location is a key driver of rice farm households’ probability to diversify. The estimates show that an increase in the latitude of the farm location increases the probability of rice farmers in the CLR to diversify. We find that 64% of the rice farm households constitute farmers for whom diversification can be a strategy for survival. For medium- to high-profit farm categories, diversification tends to protect farmers against farm profit losses arising from adverse climatic and weather variability.

The CO₂ fertilization effect has been demonstrated to boost crop production by enhancing photosynthesis and reducing drought stress. In addition to this biological channel, there is also a behavioral margin for the CO₂ fertilization effect that was previously unnoticed. I find evidence that an additional ppm of average CO₂ concentration leads to increases in the corn and soybean harvested ratios of .57 and .75 percentage points, respectively. My predictions suggest that, without considering the adjustment in harvesting decision, the crop production benefits from CO₂ fertilization effect would be biasedly estimated for both corn and soybeans, which broadens the understanding of farmers’ behavioral responses to environmental stimuli and extends the knowledge on how CO₂ would benefit crop production.