Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics最新文献

Expanding access to solar photovoltaics (PV) may help to reduce the incidence of energy poverty. Yet, little is known about the strength and magnitude of this relationship. This paper uses cross-sectional survey data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to conduct a retrospective analysis of the effects of having rooftop solar PV for Australian households. As the main identification challenges are the potential for omitted variables and reverse causality, we present results for regressions controlling for potential confounders and also use an instrumental variable approach. The study finds that having solar PV is associated with a large decrease in the likelihood of experiencing energy poverty based on objective indicators that compare household incomes and energy bills. Having solar PV is also associated with a reduction in self-reported difficulty in paying bills on time, although this effect is less robust across estimations. The findings could inform future policies for promoting residential solar PV through an improved understanding of likely impacts.

Experiments are often used to study individual decision-making under controlled circumstances. Due to their low opportunity costs and high availability, university students are frequently recruited as the study population. Even though they are rather untypical with regard to many characteristics (e.g. age and income) compared to the representatives of the social group of interest, the experimental behaviours of students are sometimes prematurely generalised to other social groups or even to humans in general. Given the widespread challenges in the agricultural and environmental sector, it is particularly interesting to address farmers' decision-making. We analyse whether agricultural students can be used to approximate the behaviour of farmers in simple economic experiments, which are often used to measure risk aversion, impatience, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, altruism and trust. Moreover, we consider the role of systematically varied monetary incentives. We find no differences between agricultural students and farmers in their risk aversion; farmers' positive reciprocity and trust are positively associated with the incentive level, which cannot be observed with agricultural students. Findings regarding altruism in the two populations are mixed and challenge the finding of earlier studies of students being less pro-social. Agricultural students are a lower boundary of impatience and negative reciprocity. These heterogeneous results suggest that scientific inference from agricultural students to farmers should be made cautiously. However, we do not deal with a representative sample of our target population (e.g. gender). Replication studies are required to evaluate the generalisability of our findings.

Finding ways to stimulate the diffusion of water-saving irrigation systems is essential to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change on water supply. We analyse the spatial diffusion of more efficient irrigation strategies in São Paulo, Brazil, comparing the two most common irrigation technologies: conventional sprinkler irrigation and the localised irrigation. We use longitudinal municipal-level information for 2006 and 2017 and test different spatial panel models' specifications, representing different hypotheses about technological transfer channels. Our results highlight how the diffusion of water-saving irrigation systems (localised irrigation) in one municipality is strongly influenced by the diffusion in neighbouring municipalities. Membership in cooperatives or farmers' associations plays a significant role in this technological transfer. On the other hand, the diffusion of less efficient systems (sprinkler irrigation) depends fundamentally on the local availability of water and unobservable factors in the neighbourhood. The discussion highlights how easing knowledge transmission may contribute to the diffusion of more sustainable agriculture practices.

An explicit policy objective of the tradable individual fishing quota programs introduced for various reef-fish species in the Gulf of Mexico in 2007 and 2010 was to restore cost-effectiveness by reducing the fishery's significant excess capacity. To gauge the success of this policy shift from a common-pool to a catch shares system, we construct a simple model of vessel participation that takes into account the regulatory systems as well as environmental and economic variables. Calibrating our model with historical data from 1990 to 2020, we show how changes in the total allowable catch, biomass, dockside prices, and the regulatory system can explain the observed contraction of the fleet size. We find that only about half of the initial contraction was due to the switch from a common-pool to a tradable quota system, the remainder being driven by the simultaneously occurring biomass recovery on the one hand and a participation-inflating contest for catch shares prior to the regime change on the other.

Reducing nutrient runoff from sugarcane production into the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) has become a major policy focus for the Queensland and Australian Governments. This study explores consumer willingness to pay (WTP) to achieve higher environmental standards for sugar originating from the GBR catchments, through the use of a GBR-safe ecolabel. A Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) and a Contingent Valuation (CV) experiment are conducted on a random sample of 1,100 Australian residents. The BWS experiment reveals that personal health considerations are more important than sustainability and environmental factors, including impacts on the GBR. Results of the CV experiment show that respondents are more likely to pay a premium to support Reef-friendly sugar if they are living in urban areas, plan to visit the GBR in the future, think that the GBR condition has declined, and are generally concerned about keeping a healthy diet. We estimate that the average WTP is $24.5/year/household, which only represents 0.34 per cent of the average weekly grocery bill of Australian households. This small contribution through increased sugar prices could conservatively raise $46.9M/year in support of sugar producers to improve water quality in the GBR. Based on these results, we recommend policy-makers consider instruments that further involve sugar consumers.

Research on the collaboration–innovation nexus emphasises that collaborations and innovation are multidimensional. Despite this emphasis, there is limited evidence on how firms' collaborative diversity affects their innovation diversity. This paper addresses this gap by examining the relationships between (i) a firm's functional diversity of collaboration (FDC) and innovation diversity, and (ii) innovation diversity and firm growth. We used longitudinal data from 738 Australian food firms, and our findings suggest that the positive relationship between FDC and innovation diversity reaches a point of saturation, beyond which additional collaboration negatively influences firms' innovation diversity. Moreover, innovation diversity depends on the motives behind alliance formation and the firm's focus on innovation. Finally, the association between innovation diversity and growth performance is heterogeneous across firms' conditional growth rate distribution.

This paper examines the consequences of a liberalisation of the EU sugar policy on Australia and other third countries. Four scenarios are simulated showing the trade and production effects of a gradual phasing-out of EU domestic support measures and EU import tariffs using two partial equilibrium models linked to each other. Compared with previous work, tariff rate quotas are represented in great detail, going beyond the classical single-origin, single-destination approach. Furthermore, supply functions of EU sugar processors are calibrated based on empirical data on production costs to overcome the problem of non-observed production costs due to the existence quota rents. Results suggest that, in particular, sugar production in Balkan countries is adversely affected by a liberalisation of the EU sugar regime. Moreover, the simulation shows that preferential LDC-ACP exporters, among them Fiji and Papua New Guinea, are displaced from the EU market leading to a decline in production. An elimination of EU import tariffs benefits in particular the Ukraine and the world's largest sugar producers, such as Australia, all with currently only limited preferential market access to the EU. During periods of low global sugar prices, these countries even increase sugar production, if the EU sugar market is completely liberalised.

We study the effects of a large-scale System of Rice Intensification (SRI) program on the water productivity of rice in Vietnam by exploiting provincial and time variations in SRI uptake and irrigation water supply over the period 2000–2012. Our findings document that the world's second-largest rice exporter could produce 4 million tonnes more rice with the same water supply in the reasonably achievable case of 20 per cent SRI uptake across its provinces. In addition, we find that SRI also increases the output of other crops, due at least partly to its possible water savings and soil nutrition preservation in rice production. Moreover, we show that SRI is more likely to be adopted in provinces with a stronger quality of provincial institutions and a weaker agricultural capital base. Numerous selectivity and randomisation tests affirm that the water productivity effect of SRI is robust to selection in SRI uptake at the province and district levels and addressing potential unobservable and omitted variable problems.