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

Greater women's bargaining power and decision-making within a household have been shown to increase investments in human capital. This study links women's participation in decision-making in dairy production with household investment in girls and boys in health, nutrition, and education. We survey households in the urbanizing region of Bangalore, India. We utilize a multinomial treatment effects model to analyze the individual and household factors that are associated with women's participation in sole or joint decision-making. We then assess how the type of decision-making influences a household's investments. The results first show that female decision-making households are more disadvantaged on average than other types of decision-making households. Second, we observe that female decision-makers for dairy production are more likely to have more children and earn a higher income than their husbands. Third, the main findings show that households in which women engage in joint decision-making have higher levels of investment across all categories for girls. Conversely, investments decrease in education and nutrition for both girls and boys when the wife is the sole decision-maker. Lastly, investments are enhanced further for girls when households can sell milk at a higher price.

This study developed a theoretical model to explain the consolidation of farmland and specialization in agriculture. In the model, farmers are assumed to be endowed with knowledge regarding the production of each crop, which evolves through learning. Knowledge across crops is substitutable to various degrees. The farm size distribution and specialization are shown to be equilibrium outcomes determined by the distribution of knowledge. A simulation example based on farm-level acreage data from California is presented to show the relevance of learning mechanisms and test model implications.

Our objective in this paper is to examine the growth of the price of farm milk quotas in Canada, to shed light on their patterns of growth within the last 15 years. Our quota price model is based on the Gordon growth model, supplemented by some important characteristics of the milk quota market. Our explanatory variables include the quota rental price, interest rate, and expectations of both price and quantity growth, all for the province of Alberta over the 2009–2023 time period. Our economic model of quota prices performs well by giving results with the predicted signs for all variables in our model and high levels of statistical significance except for expectations of quantity allocations when entered separately. The model has two variants, one with the expectation of growth in quota rents and the other with the expectation of growth in the quota asset price. Econometric issues related to time series problems are dealt with. The model allows calculation of policy risk, which shows an interesting pattern over this time period.

In this paper, we investigate the impacts of climate extremes on the production and trade of apples. Apple production being notoriously sensitive to climate shocks, we show that March and April temperatures and precipitations beyond estimated thresholds cause large yield reductions in Quebec and Ontario. In years when climate shocks are large and highly correlated across space, large variations in national production cause major variations in trade flows. Hence, we exploit the theoretical foundations of a sectoral structural gravity model to implement counterfactual trade experiments about harvest shocks in Canada and the United States. We report changes in tariffs, imports, exports, farmgate prices, and in consumer welfare. The shocks greatly impact trade between North American countries but have little impact on other countries except for Chile and New Zealand which see their exports grow.

Sustainability labeling has been increasingly integrated into many food product labels in response to consumer interest in purchasing sustainably produced food. While a product label may contain the phrase “sustainably produced”, little additional information is available to consumers regarding how sustainability has been enhanced, or the dimensions of sustainability encompassed by the label. Using data from a survey of 1416 Canadian consumers, we examine consumer perceptions of sustainability and preferences for broad versus narrow sustainability claims across several contexts, including the dimensions of sustainability and the scope of a sustainability standard with respect to compliance criteria, product coverage, and geographical coverage. We find low levels of consumer knowledge and understanding of sustainability labeling, heterogeneity with respect to which dimension of sustainability appeals to different types of consumers, and a general preference for broad over narrowly defined sustainability labels, particularly with respect to the scope of criteria encompassed by the label. Our findings suggest some confusion as to what constitutes sustainability in the context of agri-food, but that broader, more encompassing labels are likely to gain more traction with consumers.

Chinese beef imports have been increasing in recent years. At the same time, Chinese public sentiment toward foreign countries, including those who export beef to China, has been changing. Therefore, this research uses a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to investigate the role of ethnocentrism, country image, and product image on consumer willingness to pay for country-of-origin labeled beef. Results indicate, on average, Chinese consumers prefer domestic beef most, and value beef from Australia and the US somewhat similarly. Their willingness to pay varies based on their perceived image of the country that the beef originates from and based on their perception of the safety of the beef, that is, product image. The more ethnocentric consumers are, the more they prefer domestic beef and discount foreign beef. Importantly, the effects of ethnocentrism, country image, and product image are stronger on the willingness to pay for domestic beef than for imported beef. More generally, findings indicate that controlling for ethnocentrism, country image, and product image contributes to understanding consumer willingness to pay for products originating from foreign countries. Overall, findings suggest that stronger ethnocentric tendencies lead to lower willingness to pay for imported beef (with some exceptions), and positive country image and product image increase the willingness to pay for imported beef. Thus, it is important to consider these constructs when estimating consumer willingness to pay for imported products, especially for countries where public sentiment toward exporting countries may be prone to change in a dynamic global environment.

Increasing frequency of extreme weather events threatens the livelihoods of low-income farm households due to the heavy dependence on rain-fed agriculture coupled with the under-developed formal markets for risk management products. Thus, crop diversification is one of the widely used ex ante adaptation strategies to hedge against weather risk exposure. In this study, we use survey data from the northern Savanna zone of Ghana merged with historical weather data to shed light on the heterogeneous impact of crop diversification on farm net returns and risk exposure. We employ the dose response function and instrumental variable techniques to address potential endogeneity concerns. Overall, our findings show that crop diversification is a welfare-enhancing strategy that significantly increases farm net returns, lowers the probability of crop failure, and thus decreases downside risk exposure. Notably, our dose-response function analysis demonstrates that the positive benefits of crop diversification are particularly pronounced at lower intensities, reaching an optimal threshold. Beyond this point, the incremental advantages tend to diminish, suggesting the importance of carefully considering the optimal level of diversification for maximum benefits. The results further underscore the significant impact of both access to agricultural extension services and fertilizer usage on the adoption of crop diversification.

In the United States, truck rates for perishable food, the per-mile rate charged for trucking services to move perishable food from farms to stores, rose substantially in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era. We argue that rising truck rates is a signal of a broader shortage of truckers, but the connection between labor shortages, rising truck rates, and a lack of trucking services has yet to be established empirically. In this paper, we develop an empirical examination based on an equilibrium job search, matching, and bargaining framework in which we estimate the role of labor shortages in accelerating driver-wage growth, and truck rates for agricultural products. We estimate the model by combining US Bureau of Census Current Population Survey data on truck driver wages with USDA-Agricultural Marketing Service Service data on truck rates to establish the linkage between trucker supply and the demand for trucking services. We find that the COVID-19 pandemic was responsible for a rise in for-hire trucker wages of some $��38�\%�$, a rise in average truck rates of nearly $��50�\%�$ and that the gap between trucker-job openings and successful matches explains a significant, but small, rise in truck rates.

Method myopia is defined as theoretical rhetoric absent empirical discernment regarding flavor-of-the-day econometric methodologies. This Fellows Address discusses why method myopia is pervasive, what factors contribute to the pervasiveness, why is likely it to increase, and finally, a possible remedy. To that end, incentive structures facing researchers, reviewers, and editors are considered within the life-cycle of a typical econometric methodology. Considering our discipline is empirically driven, there are potentially large costs by using flavor-of-the-day methodologies when an alternative -- possibly leading to different economic results and policy responses -- is the appropriate method. Furthermore, method myopia can notably restrict the set of research problems examined thereby creating additional, potentially large, opportunity costs. Finally, over-selling the superiority/completeness/correctness of results from such flavor-of-the-day methodologies to policy makers can not only be costly in the particular case, but can undermine the long-term credibility of our disciplinary advice to policy makers.

Transmission of prices, profits, and more generally, economic well-being across vertically connected sectors of agriculture have a long history of interest—arguably of most current interest in meat and livestock markets. Disruptions in live animal harvesting, especially from COVID-19, have corresponded with substantial market adjustment and hence elevated interest in inner-industry relationships, including from policymakers. This paper's main contribution is assessing how price changes in the U.S. feedlot industry manifest in feeder cattle markets. We use Ricardian rent theory as a framework to quantify price transmission by testing how price fluctuations actually pass through the supply chain versus theoretical expectations. We posit that the capacity utilization of feedlots changes because of market shocks, impacting price relationships. In the empirical model, when feedlot capacity utilization rates are below the 65% critical point, we find that both fed to feeder cattle and corn to feeder cattle pass-through rates are higher than hypothesized. When feedlot capacity utilization rates are high (>65%), estimated pass-through rates are lower and not statistically different from Ricardian rent theory. Understanding how prices pass through in the beef industry can help inform policy discussions about beef market competitiveness and promote efficient resource allocation.