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

To optimize land conservation strategies with limited resources, it is necessary to understand people's preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for green open space. The hedonic pricing method (HPM) is widely used. However, the conventional HPM assumes no value spillovers between neighbouring properties. Here we adopt a spatial regression approach that allows us to relax the no-spillover assumption. Through an analysis of access to different types, intensity and developability of open green space on house prices in the City of Edmonton, Canada, we illustrate how spatial HPM can be used to quantify direct and spillover values of different dimensions of open green space. We find that WTP for open space has significant spillover effects, ignoring such spillovers would under-estimate the total value of open space protection and thus the socially optimal amount of land conservation. All else equal, people are willing to pay most for houses that are close to non-developable green open space and woodlands. The highest price premiums are for woodlands and non-developable green open space, followed by living near the University of Alberta farm. On the contrary, people need small compensation to live near large commercial farms. The results suggest a NIMBY attitude toward preservation of commercial agriculture.

As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic of early 2020, production in the United States, as in much of the world, largely came to a standstill. Unemployment in the United States quickly rose from 3.5% in February to 13.2% in May, quarter-to-quarter GDP fell 7.8%, and substantial transfers were enacted to maintain household income. The resulting mismatch between aggregate supply and demand not surprisingly ignited an inflation that by early 2022 had reached a year-over-year 40-year high. The purpose of the present communication is to utilize a framework developed from data embodied in surveys of households’ consumer expenditures to analyze impacts of this inflation on separate categories of expenditure. The engine for the analysis, whose construction is described in detail by Taylor (2013, is a matrix of “intra-budget” coefficients that represent the direct relationships amongst different categories of expenditure in households’ budgets. The elements of this matrix are constructed from the information in 58 quarters of data (2006 through 2019) from the ongoing BLS Survey of Consumer Expenditure to analyze effects and impacts on 16 categories of US household consumption expenditure of the 2021–2022 inflation. Principal findings include: expenditures for housing, transportation, gasoline and oil, and personal insurance consistently endure the largest impacts from inflation; real- income effects from inflation differ from those arising from a like cut in nominal income; not surprisingly, food expenditures are most impacted at low income.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the economics of production efficiency of dairy farms, with a specific focus on the role of agricultural policy. Our analysis is based on a representative sample of Irish dairy farms, ranging from 2000 to 2018, which includes a period of major change in EU dairy policy. Based on a multi-input multi-output production system, we first estimate technical, allocative, scale and scope efficiencies. We find significant heterogeneity in technical and allocative efficiencies, which change over time. We also calculate shadow prices of milk quota, which suggest that milk quotas restricted many farmers and limited their ability to produce milk. Finally, we explore determinants of technical, allocative, scale and overall inefficiencies using random panel-data censored regression. We find that subsidies are positively associated with farm efficiency, but the effects vary over distinct quota abolition periods. Overall, our empirical findings indicate that agricultural policy had important effects on the managerial effectiveness of farmers.

Consumer participation plays an important role in improving food safety. Current research shows that reducing associated costs can promote consumer participation; however, the cost-reduction-oriented policies adopted by the Chinese government has had little impact on consumer participation. This study explores the reasons for the failure of the Chinese cost-reduction-oriented policies in food safety governance from the perspective of the collective action dilemma. Building upon previous work and using data from an online survey of 1229 consumers in China, we use a mediating effect model to examine the causal relationship between the low participation rate and the high participation cost. The results suggest that low consumer participation in food safety governance is due to free-riding built on the actions of others. The problem with the cost-reduction-oriented policies is that they addressed high participation costs, identified by this study as the consequence of non-participation, but paid little attention to the actual cause – free-riding. Our research sheds light on the collective action dilemma from a new perspective to understand consumer participation. Assessing the relationship between participation cost, free-riding, and the actual participation behavior in food safety governance could lead to a new line of theoretical and empirical inquiry for studying collective action in public affairs.

Portion cap rules have been proposed to regulate the consumption of foods and ingredients deemed unhealthy. Challenging common intuition, previous theoretical work posits that, when the seller leverages bundling to price-discriminate, buyers are not necessarily affected and some may even benefit from a quantity restriction. I conduct an experiment designed to test this claim. In the laboratory, human subjects take the role of sellers and offer two products to automated buyers with private preferences. I manipulate the policy environment across treatments. The data largely corroborate the anticipated impacts on consumer surplus, speaking to their robustne ss. In particular, consumers with a low appreciation for the regulated good and a high valuation for the unrestricted item benefit from the cap rule.

This study assesses agricultural economics literature on farmland prices and key determinants of these prices. The first section of the paper uses a basic capitalization model to organize a review of the literature and data. We then provide a focused assessment of five streams of literature examining farmland prices: (1) boom-bust; (2) the capitalization effect of government agricultural subsidies on farmland prices; (3) agricultural zoning; (4) climate change; and (5) prohibitions against non-local buyers of farmland. Our review highlights challenges to ongoing efforts to model changing farmland prices, the modern emphasis on econometric identification, important variation in the magnitude of estimated relationships across the literature, and the opportunity to expand research in Canada.

Futures prices are discontinuous, with each future price series ending at maturity. Differencing before splicing can create a continuous future return series, but still leaves price levels with discrete jumps. When comparing cash and futures prices, there is a need to either make the futures more like the cash price by adding back the changes at rollover or removing the nonstationarity and seasonality from cash prices. In the specific situation of only testing market efficiency of futures prices, we propose using panel unit root tests. Our empirical examples using weekly prices show the null hypothesis of a unit root is not rejected in most cases regardless of the test used.

Following Carter and Mérel (2016), we explore the export benefits of reforming supply management (SM) in Canada's dairy sector. A trade model with ten regions and five dairy product categories is developed and used to examine the potential benefits of opening international markets to Canadian dairy products. In addition to a baseline, three scenarios are compared—one with SM in place but with Canada able to export freely. Two other scenarios assume SM is eliminated and there is complete free trade, but with high- and low-cost structures. Findings indicate that, in the high-cost scenario, domestic consumers gain from lower prices as the domestic supply and exports fall compared to the status quo, but producers are less well off. However, under a low domestic cost structure, Canada becomes a major exporter of milk, with both producers and consumers gaining from free trade. This scenario assumes that domestic producers take advantage of economies of scale, enabling them to compete in international markets. Appropriate policies will be required to reform the quota regime, while minimizing the harm done to dairy farmers.

This paper synthesizes Canada's environmental valuation literature over the last six decades. Focusing on primary valuation benefit estimates, we link multiple research outputs from the same data collection effort to obtain an accurate measure of unique studies. We identify a total of 269 unique valuation studies conducted in Canada between 1964 and 2019. The number of valuation studies conducted per year has not increased since 1975 and the median data collection year is 1996. Stated preference (SP) methods are the most popular valuation approaches being used in more than 50% of studies and this share has increased to over 80% within the last decade. We discuss numerous gaps in our knowledge for certain environmental resources and regions, in particular Canada's three Northern territories. The paper provides information on the state of environmental valuation research in Canada and identifies future research needs.

Meat processing plants use inputs in fixed proportions, but these proportions vary with plant size. Shocks to the supply of labor and livestock induce allocative inefficiency, output reductions, and higher unit costs of production. Both labor conflicts and the pandemic caused long labor shortages resulting in unused capacity and large livestock queues. Industry concentration and vertical integration can mitigate some of these problems by internalizing queuing costs and by reallocating workers across plants. Daily shocks make plants operate with either too many workers or too many live animals. Larger plants choose to be labor-constrained more frequently, creating a trade-off between wages and safety for workers.