Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics最新文献

Although soil degradation has become a global phenomenon that might severely threaten the provision of a large range of ecosystem services, not much is known about the economic value of soil functions such as carbon sequestration and rainfall water infiltration. Knowing these values would be an important input into the recently developed concept of Soil Security. This paper aimed at closing this gap for a broad set of soil functions valued at the regional level in the Veneto region in Italy and New South Wales in Australia. The study not only elicits non-market values by a choice experiment but also investigates the impact of personal norm activation and social norms on stated preferences, by a hybrid choice model with multiple latent variables. As the survey was conducted in two countries, our study offers evidence of the external validity of both social norm effects and personal norm activation. The results reveal that respondents positively value the conservation of the soil functions and that both personal norm activation and social norm clearly affect stated preferences.

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technology for rice, which makes rice resistant to its two most destructive insect pests, is an alternative to insect-resistant genetically modified (GM) rice. We advance an economic framework to determine ex ante the planting share of CRISPR rice in China under uncertainty about pest severity and analyse its most significant factors. Using our baseline data and an assumption that yields of CRISPR rice are 10 per cent lower than conventional rice, we estimate the planting share of CRISPR rice to be 37.9 per cent. The mean of the annual benefit of growing CRISPR rice and conventional rice together over conventional rice alone is 2.32 billion US dollars.

Global crop prices decidedly co-move: research supporting this view abounds. What is unclear is how strong the co-movement is between them. This paper tests for a strong form of co-movement amongst global crop prices before and after the global financial crisis (GFC) using a multivariate decomposition framework based on a serial-correlation common feature. More specifically, we analyze common trends (i.e., long-run co-movement) and common cycles (i.e., short-run co-movement) amongst the global prices of five major crops: corn, palm oil, rice, soybean, and wheat. We show that corn and soybean prices are closely associated in the long and the short run—they respond similarly to persistent and transitory shocks. Furthermore, their associations have strengthened since the GFC. In contrast, the co-movement of rice prices with the other crop prices has weakened during the 2010s. Overall, the cycles are relatively muted after the GFC, indicating that the five crop prices are trend-dominated during this period; the observed prices adhere closely to their long-run trends.

The recent stated preference literature emphasises the importance of incentive compatible elicitation methods, which depend on respondent beliefs that payment can be collected if provision occurs. We investigate this condition in a randomised field experiment where stated choices are incentivised financially. The objective of the treatment was to make choices salient by making each decision financially relevant and to increase the respondents' beliefs that future payments will be enforced. Our results show that the treatment increases estimates of the marginal utility of income, with the effect being economically and statistically significant for low-income respondents. We develop a stylised theoretical framework that allows us to quantify the bias that is implied by the observed differences between the treated and control groups. We find that failure to account for respondents' doubts about payment coercion in an otherwise well-designed survey inflates the marginal willingness to pay among low-income respondents by a factor of at least 1.72.

Emerging advances in sustainable intensification technologies have the potential to transform land use and crop management approaches in ways that can increase resource productivity and reduce adverse environmental impacts of agricultural production. This paper describes emerging technologies that can sustainably intensify food and renewable energy production. We apply the findings from studies examining the adoption of technologies with similar stylized features to provide insights about the incentives and barriers for the adoption of these emerging technologies. We also present a landscape-based systems approach, based on welfare economics, to go beyond relying on a positive approach to explain observed adoption decisions to examining normative questions about the optimal mix, level, and location of adoption of these technologies to achieve desired societal outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of the insights from applied economics for the design of policy incentives to achieve these outcomes.

Contract farming has gained in importance in many developing countries. Previous studies analysed effects of contracts on smallholder farmers’ welfare, yet mostly without considering that different types of contractual relationships exist. Here, we examine associations between contract farming and farm household income in the oil palm sector of Ghana, explicitly differentiating between two types of contracts, namely simple marketing contracts and more comprehensive resource-providing contracts. Moreover, we look at different income sources to better understand how both contracts are linked to farmers’ livelihood strategies. We use cross-sectional survey data and regression models. Issues of endogeneity are addressed through measuring farmers' willingness-to-participate in contracts and using this indicator as an additional covariate. Farmers with both types of contracts have significantly higher household incomes than farmers without a contract, yet with notable differences in terms of the income sources. Farmers with a marketing contract allocate more household labour to off-farm activities and thus have higher off-farm income. In contrast, farmers with a resource-providing contract have larger oil palm plantations and thus higher farm incomes. The findings suggest that the two contract types are associated with different livelihood strategies and that disaggregated analysis of different income sources is important to better understand possible underlying mechanisms.

The special issue assembles papers that addressed the following themes: how COVID-19 has affected agricultural and resource-based industries, the effects of major disruptions due to other disasters beyond COVID-19 on the sector and the collective lessons for policymakers and practitioners. This paper provides an overview of the contributions.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated public health and social distancing mandates caused unprecedented shifts and disruptions for local and regional food systems (LRFS). The pandemic also brought new and heightened attention to the structure and resiliency of US food systems, and LRFS appeared to be positioned to significantly increase the scope and scale of their market reach as a result. Researchers from three universities collaborated with staff from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service to recruit leaders from sixteen key coalitions within the U.S. LRFS sector to frame an adaptive, community-driven set of applied research activities to understand important themes, learn from effective responses and gain insights into how local and regional supply chains may change post-pandemic. In this paper, we summarise urgent and emergent strategies and innovations from LRFS captured in a fall 2020 consumer survey, with additional insights on how the survey was framed and interpreted, considering synthesis of collaborative discussions and project team interactions. We conclude the article with a set of research, policy and technical assistance priorities that were identified and validated by this LRFS network.

Hydrogen is expected to play a role in the future low-carbon economy as an energy carrier, but its market penetration remains to be seen. Much of the existing literature generally focuses on comparison of marginal production costs and prices to make rather optimistic projections. This study argues that such analysis is myopic as important barriers are ignored. Following Porter’s five-force approach, we methodologically identify the economic market forces that shape the development of hydrogen markets, and discuss key obstacles in the supply chain. Using evidence of available hydrogen technologies and costs, the distribution network is identified as a major fixed-investment barrier to market entry, but it is argued that much of it could be overcome if natural gas infrastructure and technology is shared with the hydrogen sector. Natural gas, in turn, is projected to function as a transition fuel under current carbon emissions targets. This study finds that policy costs needed to promote hydrogen to achieve environmental goals can be substantially reduced if government and private investment decisions strategically focus on synergies with natural gas. The possible formulation of such policies is discussed using Australia’s hydrogen industry as a case study.

We simulate the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Australian economy using VURM, a detailed computable general equilibrium model for Australia. We identify five sources of economic perturbations: changes to productivity due to changing work practices, changes in household demand imposed by voluntary and mandated social distancing behaviour, changes in international trade due to a weakened world economy and severe curtailment of international travel, reduced population growth due to lower net migration and large debt-financed fiscal stimulus. Variants of these shocks and associated recovery paths are simulated in VURM, with three scenarios describing potential recovery arcs. The macroeconomic and industry impacts are reported for each scenario. Ultimately, our focus is on the impact on output and employment in the agriculture and mining sectors, and on their likely recovery prospects. At the peak of economic impacts, output in these sectors declines by about 6 per cent relative to a no-COVID baseline. Compared to the economy-wide average, the decline in agriculture and mining output is small. This can be explained by relatively minor impacts on work practices, relatively low negative impacts on demand for intensive agriculture (helped by fiscal supports for households) and relatively low disruption to export demand.