Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy最新文献

This paper underscores the critical role of multisectoral convergence in enhancing child health, particularly in addressing anemia, a micronutrient deficiency linked to both diet and sanitation. We explore how the integration of nationwide food and nutrition programs with sanitation initiatives impacts anemia in Indian children under three. Our findings reveal that children benefiting from both interventions had significantly higher hemoglobin levels (by 0.08 g/dL or more) than those without. Such a policy convergence is key to reducing anemia and advancing the Sustainable Development Goals for improved nutrition and sanitation. We estimate that it could potentially transition 2130–6711 children out of anemia. Our results are consistent across wealth and place of residence, and robust to changes in model specifications.

Compliance with health safety protocols is important for protecting public health, particularly in agricultural sectors where disease outbreaks can disrupt production and market access. Despite its economic significance, we know little about what drives protocol compliance. We examine the relationship between individuals' objective and self-assessed knowledge and their compliance with safety measures in the context of COVID-19. We find that greater opposition to COVID-19 safety protocols is associated with lower objective knowledge and inflated self-assessed knowledge, indicating overconfidence. Addressing cognitive biases could make public health interventions more effective, with important implications for agricultural settings where resilience depends on consistent protocol adherence.

Non-tariff measures (NTMs) play a growing role in trade policy. Economists quantify NTMs by calculating their Ad Valorem Equivalents (AVE), typically employing one of two global NTM datasets: TRAINS from UNCTAD or WTO notifications. While TRAINS data better measure NTMs, their limited coverage over countries and time is inadequate for many types of analyses, and thus researchers often resort to using WTO data, which is not as accurate as the TRAINS but has better coverage. We compare the two datasets to assess whether AVEs from WTO notifications align with those from TRAINS, given similar country and time coverage. We find significant AVE discrepancies between datasets, sometimes reversing signs, warranting caution when using WTO notifications in the absence of TRAINS data to construct NTMs.

Nguyen, L. D., T. T. Nguyen, T. T. Nguyen, and U. Grote. 2025. “Health Shock and Indebtedness: Does Having Access to Health Insurance Reduce the Reliance on Borrowing as a Shock Coping Strategy?” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 47, no. 2: 823–862. https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13495.

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The Colorado River is a lifeline for more than 40 million people in the western United States. However, with climate change diminishing snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains and increasing demands from agriculture and urban areas, the river's flow has become insufficient to meet all the competing needs. A wide range of policies and programs are being proposed and considered to reduce the use of river water. Most of these policies compensate water users who engage in water-saving practices. Agriculture, which consumes over 85% of the river's water, is a primary target of these conservation policies. In this paper, we use operation-level data to estimate producers' revealed preferences regarding crop choices and irrigated acreage. We then use these estimated preferences to investigate the cost of reducing water use in irrigated agriculture across the basin states. We find a total abatement cost of $275 million for reducing the first million acre-feet of water. Our results also indicate significant regional differences in the cost of abating irrigation water use between the Upper and Lower Basins, with the Lower Basin states exhibiting lower marginal abatement costs compared to the Upper Basin. These findings could guide the design of future policies and programs aimed at reducing water use in the Colorado River Basin, particularly as current guidelines for the river's water management are due to expire in 2026.

Agricultural producers often borrow from multiple lenders, raising concerns about credit risk and monitoring. We construct detailed farm-level measures of how debt is distributed across lenders and examine how farm financial status and the physical presence of local lenders are linked to this practice. Using nearly two decades of farm financial records from Kansas, we find that larger, more leveraged, and more profitable farms are more likely to engage in multiple borrowing. Proximity to Farm Credit locations is unrelated to multiple borrowing, while more banks are linked to less, underscoring the importance of maintaining relationship lending for banks.

Amidst dwindling state funding and the legislative withdrawal from public university research support, a heightened political process shapes the allocation of scarce tax dollars. This article explores how advocacy within the political process influences funding support for higher education from state legislatures. We generate a novel dataset of state-level experiment station funding allocations and explanatory variables from 2004 to 2018 to explore the financial and political elements impacting the support for state agricultural research funding decisions. We also address the interplay of economic conditions, legislative professionalism, and political will in shaping the funding landscape. Our findings emphasize that university advocacy efforts to connect with legislators and strategic positioning within university hierarchies are correlated with maintained and expanded agricultural research station funding.

Row crops such as soybeans, corn, wheat, and cotton are the backbone of the U.S. farm sector, accounting for around $60 billion of exports in 2023. While U.S. row crop exports remain robust, growing concerns over the rising U.S. agricultural trade deficit underscore the need to appraise the ongoing market and policy dynamics affecting the viability of this key sector. To this end, we analyze recent trends and policy issues impacting U.S. row crops. In particular, we highlight how trade and domestic policies, evolving comparative advantages, and other market forces have shaped recent trade patterns. We also provide a forward-looking assessment of how U.S. trade in row crops is likely to evolve in coming years, and further outline potential policy approaches to maintaining the U.S. position in global markets for row crops.