Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy最新文献

Ambitious pesticide policies aiming to reduce pesticide applications and risks have been introduced across Europe. Herbicides represent a major part of pesticide use, but the uptake of mechanical or agronomic alternatives remains low. We here explore underlying reasons and provide policy insights for supporting a transformation to herbicide-free production, accounting for both economic and agronomic drivers. We develop detailed extensions to an existing bio-economic modeling approach and use stochastic dominance analysis to assess the performance of non-chemical alternatives to herbicides under different production and market conditions exante. We apply our approach to Swiss wheat production and find that herbicide-free production is not viable without financial support, and thus requires additional per-hectare agri-environmental payments and price markups to be economically viable. We find that currently available support payments in Switzerland are sufficient in achieving economic viability of herbicide-free production. Moreover, we confirm the relevance of risk and risk preferences and identify a risk-reducing character of herbicide-free production systems with support payments. Our analysis provides insights on potential drivers, trade-offs, decision-making factors, and policies for a transition to non-chemical weed control.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections of USDA's mandatory farm and nutrition program outlays are important in shaping US agricultural policy. Using CBO projections and observed outcomes from 1985 through 2020, we examine the degree to which projections of farm, supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), and child nutrition program outlays are unbiased, efficient, and informative. We find that projections for farm and child nutrition program outlays are unbiased, SNAP outlays are unbiased at short-term but are downward biased beyond a 3-year horizon. All three series of projections are inefficient. SNAP and child nutrition program outlay projections are informative up to a 5-year horizon, but the farm program outlay projections are informative for only a 1-year horizon. Disaggregated farm program data since 2008 suggests that the uninformativeness principally stems from conservation and commodity program projections. The findings may be valuable to CBO, as they continue to improve projections, and to projection users, in adjusting their expectations.

Immigrants are vital to agricultural production in the United States, and nearly half the crop workforce is unauthorized. Previous attempts to reform the immigration system have not successfully legalized the farm workforce or caused substantive rise in farmworker incomes. Current proposed legislation would legalize unauthorized farmworkers, streamline the H-2A agricultural guest worker program, and provide a pathway to citizenship for H-2A workers while simultaneously requiring agricultural employers to check the immigration status of workers using E-Verify. This paper discusses proposed farm labor legislation in the context of current farm labor market conditions, outcomes of historical farm labor and immigration policies, and ongoing immigration trends.

Grant, Jason H., Shawn Arita, Charlotte Emlinger, Robert Johansson, and Chaoping Xie. 2021. “Agricultural exports and retaliatory trade actions: An empirical assessment of the 2018/2019 trade conflict.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 43(2): 619–640. https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13138.

In the acknowledgements section, the text “The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the authors and do represent any official U.S. Department of Agriculture or U.S. government determination or policy.” was incorrect.

This should have read: “The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the authors and do not represent any official U.S. Department of Agriculture or U.S. government determination or policy.”

We apologize for this error.

Impacted by both economic and political forces, agricultural research serves as a critical approach to alleviating the adverse effects of climate change. Focusing on public agricultural research in the United States, this paper provides a literature review on research and development from the perspectives of the market environment and political economy. It also examines the current assessment of agricultural research effectiveness in addressing the challenges of climate change. A bibliometric analysis is conducted to appreciate the knowledge dynamics in the nexus of agricultural research, political economy, and climate change. Future research directions related to public agricultural research are discussed.

Agricultural and applied economists make substantial positive contributions to the domestic economy. Defining a measure of the true total value of their contributions is likely impossible, because so much about their efforts is difficult to comprehensively observe and quantitatively document. In this paper, we adopt a conservative approach to generating an estimate of the contributions ag and applied economists make to U.S. economic output and the associated welfare of society through their teaching, research, and outreach efforts. To conduct the analysis, we implemented a nationwide survey of Agricultural and Applied Economics (AAE) departments and developed a framework to calculate the value of their contributions to national income, or Gross Domestic Product (GDP). We estimate that AAE departments increase overall U.S. GDP by $2.6 billion, annually. Through its efforts to improve the human capital of its graduates, AAE teaching raises the (expected) national income by $2.2–$2.3 billion, while we value direct research and outreach contributions at $207 million and $146 million, respectively. Because we do not observe the opportunity cost of the resources used to generate those contributions, we do not claim to estimate a true net economic impact but rather attempt to quantify the gross economic contributions of the professional services AAE departments currently offer the economy. The values we provide—especially the research and extension estimates which are exceedingly difficult to measure—likely underestimate the true benefits AAE offers to the nation.