Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics-Revue Canadienne D Agroeconomie最新文献

This study develops a comprehensive typology of farmers' risk management strategies, simultaneously considering both market-based (e.g., insurance) and on-farm instruments (e.g., high equity ratios). Using Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) clustering on data collected from 228 German farmers in Saxony during 2022, we identify two distinct farmer types with different approaches to risk management. Our analysis reveals that risk predictability is associated with instrument choice, while resource availability moderates management responses. This relationship manifests in distinct patterns: Large-scale professional farmers develop comprehensive systems combining formal risk management instruments with infrastructural solutions, particularly for highly predictable risks, reflecting their market exposure and resource capacity. In contrast, small-scale diversified farmers opt for more flexible approaches that allow for adaptation to both predictable and less predictable risks while aligning with their resource constraints. The results have implications for agricultural policy, insurance companies, farmers, and advisory services, indicating that effective risk management support should acknowledge the rationality of different approaches and focus on reducing implementation barriers specific to different farm types rather than promoting standardized solutions.

Agriculture is a cornerstone of the Sub-Saharan African (SSA) economy, and leveraging ICT to enhance productivity is vital for improving food security. While prior studies focus on ICT's micro-level effects in agriculture, its macro-level impact on SSA's cereal production remains underexplored. This study employs the method of moment quantile regression (MMQR) and a balanced panel dataset to analyze the effects of ICT adoption on cereal production across SSA from 2001 to 2022. The findings reveal that mobile phone usage significantly boosts cereal production, particularly benefiting lower-productivity farmers. Internet access enhances yields, with its impact strengthening at higher productivity levels. Expanded network coverage also positively influences production, while fixed broadband subscriptions show a negative correlation, likely due to rural infrastructure limitations. Furthermore, the study identifies education and agricultural credit as key channels through which ICT improves cereal production. Finally, we find bidirectional causality between cereal production and mobile phone usage, internet access, and network coverage, while fixed broadband subscriptions exhibit a unidirectional causal effect. These insights suggest that policies promoting network expansion, mobile connectivity, and internet access, especially in rural areas, could significantly enhance cereal production in SSA.

Cooperatives follow principles such as limits in trading shares and democratic control that supposedly imply financial constraints. In fact, these limits make banks their main external sources of financing and raise specific issues about financial structure. This study proposes a principal/agent model to understand better how information asymmetry affects retained earnings and debt. Our findings are consistent with observations of the financial trends of US agricultural cooperatives for the period 2010–2020: dairy cooperatives have been able to finance growth via debt but with a more than proportional increase in unallocated retained earnings compared to allocated equity. Our model shows that retained earnings are not necessarily due to financial rationing but can be a contractual tool that allows cooperatives to finance their growth with debt, despite their specific ownership structure.

Taxation and portion cap rules are alternative policies available to regulate the consumption of sugary drinks. We examine their impacts on consumer surplus and choice availability in an experimental market where sellers can practice second-degree price discrimination. In the laboratory, single-product sellers interacted with automated buyers with either low or high preference. Under a cap rule, sellers provided two options as frequently as in the control. With a tax, sellers offered single-option menus more frequently and their pricing strategy excluded low-type buyers. Consumer surplus remained unaffected under a cap but was diminished under taxation. We conclude that taxation is not superior to portion size limits in settings with discrete buyer types and when consumer welfare and product availability are of primary concern.

Using farm-level panel data, we directly estimate the impacts of the Korea–Chile Free Trade Agreements (FTA) on the revenue of the firms in South Korea that faced greater imports—agricultural producers as the FTA induced greater imports of fruits and vegetables from Chile to South Korea. As expected, we find the negative effect of the increased imports on the total crop revenue and profit of the farms. We model and examine the differential impacts and find that the negative effects are greater for high-revenue farms. We document the evidence of the lack of immediate adjustment as a response to the negative shocks from the trade agreement.

Agricultural water pollution from the livestock industry is a growing concern in China and globally. Since 2014, China classified eight urban provinces in the southeast as a development control zone (DCZ), which prohibits new hog facility construction and encourages hog farms to relocate to other regions. Leveraging synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID), we systematically analyze the impacts of such place-based regulations on the hog industry and water pollution, especially revealing heterogenous responses. Our results show that, on average, the regulations led to heterogenous reductions in hog inventories both within and across DCZ provinces, mainly resulting from the closures of existing hog farms. The effects range from a 2% increase to 40% hog inventory reduction, equivalent to a loss of over U.S. $5.06 billion in the DCZ hog sectoral revenue. We explore three channels to explain the heterogeneity: counties upstream of big cities, counties designated as main hog counties, and counties with drinking water sources serve as origins of the heterogenous effects. However, we find no significant water quality improvement.

Approximately 50% of the farmer respondents to the 2023 Ontario Farmland Value and Rental Value Survey (OFVRVS) indicate that farmland prices are “too high” relative to fundamentals. The survey also asks respondents about rent and price information for a familiar parcel of farmland. We use this information to construct a rent-to-price ratio and then apply regression analysis to data collected from the 2023 OFVRVS. We find that the respondents in the lowest quartile of the rent-to-price ratio are associated with a 17% increase in the probability of indicating farmland prices are “too high.”

Price is one of the most important factors affecting consumer purchase decisions. Consumers may use price as a quality cue or reference point to make the decisions. However, few studies have considered the quality cue by controlling the price anchoring and vice versa. We conduct four identical experiments weeks apart to estimate the effect of price on consumers' product quality evaluation and WTP. The results show that (1) the price has a significant impact on appearance rating and taste rating; (2) product quality mediates the price effect on consumer WTP only if consumers have incomplete quality information about the product; and (3) the marginal effect of price on consumer WTP differs over time. The results of this study provide deep insights into the role of price on consumers' quality assessment and valuation formation of products.

Reducing the negative environmental impact of production activities without (substantial) loss of production is a crucial challenge for the agricultural sector. Investigating farms' environmental and technical efficiency (TE) levels and drivers can contribute to addressing this issue. In this regard, based on recent theoretical developments on the appropriate handling of undesirable outputs in the modeling of production technologies, this paper introduces a multi-equation stochastic frontier framework for technical and environmental efficiency (EE) analysis. This framework is applied to a sample of French suckler sheep farms. The results indicate that, on average, farms in the sample can increase their desirable output by 20% without using more inputs while reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by 24%. Findings also show that relatively high (low) levels of TE are associated with relatively low (high) levels of EE and that the likelihood for a farm to be both technically and environmentally efficient is relatively low. Only 32% of the farms in the sample have a high level of TE and EE. Drivers such as decoupled direct payments are positively associated with EE and negatively associated with TE, while no significant effect is found for green direct payments.

This paper develops a sequential game-theoretic model of technology licensing with heterogeneous firms and consumers in a mixed oligopoly to systematically analyze the optimal licensing decision of the cooperative and the market and welfare impacts of cooperative involvement in the licensing of cost-reducing process innovations. Analytical results show that the organizational form does matter in technology licensing; cooperative behavior differs from that of its investor-owned counterparts yielding significantly different equilibrium outcomes in mixed oligopolies where the cooperative is the licensor of the process innovation involved. While our analysis focuses on cost-reducing process innovations, our results are more general and hold also for quality-enhancing product innovations.