Who responds more to environmental amenities and dis-amenities?

It is hypothesised that different property sub-markets react to flood risk information, floods and environmental factors differently. To test this hypothesis this research uses spatial quantile regression and quasi-experimental techniques to examine property sub-market behaviour in response to availability of flood risk information and actual flood. This new contribution to the literature is based on the use of the mapping of flood risk areas in 2009 and the 2011 flooding of Brisbane, Australia, as a case study. The results show that the impact of flood risk and actual flood on property markets varies between different sub-markets. They therefore confirm the existence of property sub-markets based on property and environmental characteristics and suggest the need for differentiate mitigation policies.     

Does the estimated impact of wildfires vary with the housing price distribution? A quantile regression approach

Hedonic property models are commonly applied in the environmental economics literature to estimate values of environmental amenities or hazards. Most hedonic property models are estimated using linear regression techniques where the coefficient on the environmental variable of interest is the “marginal implicit price.” Linear regression estimates one coefficient for the entire distribution of the dependent variable, and thus in hedonic property models a single marginal implicit price. In contrast, quantile regression estimates a range of marginal impacts for different quantiles of the distribution for the dependent variable, consequently providing a significantly more “complete picture” of the true impact of the explanatory variable (Koeneker and Hallock, 2001). We contribute to the existing hedonic property literature by estimating the impact of repeated wildfires on house prices in Southern California using quantile regression. We find that the impact of a wildfire differs significantly across the distribution of house prices, with estimated coefficients varying as much as 73% from the 25th quantile relative to the 75th quantile. We also find that OLS results under-estimate impacts relative to the median quantile, yet over-estimate impacts for lower quantiles. Our results indicate that a quantile regression approach can provide policymakers and researchers more information about the marginal implicit price in hedonic models as it relates to the distribution of the dependent variable.     

A structural time series analysis of US broiler exports

A structural time series model is used to determine the dynamic characteristics, forecasting properties, and policy implications of factors affecting the US broiler export market. The emphasis is on international market responsiveness. The analysis indicates that in addition to the explanatory variables a trend component has been vital in the expansion of the broiler industry during the study period. The results indicate that export markets are more price responsive than the domestic markets, that interventions in the Canadian and Mexican markets reduce their imports, and exchange rate changes have significant impacts on US exports.     

Projecting future crop productivity for global economic modeling

Assessments of climate change impacts on agricultural markets and land‐use patterns rely on quantification of climate change impacts on the spatial patterns of land productivity. We supply a set of climate impact scenarios on agricultural land productivity derived from two climate models and two biophysical crop growth models to account for some of the uncertainty inherent in climate and impact models. Aggregation in space and time leads to information losses that can determine climate change impacts on agricultural markets and land‐use patterns because often aggregation is across steep gradients from low to high impacts or from increases to decreases. The four climate change impact scenarios supplied here were designed to represent the most significant impacts (high emission scenario only, assumed ineffectiveness of carbon dioxide fertilization on agricultural yields, no adjustments in management) but are consistent with the assumption that changes in agricultural practices are covered in the economic models. Globally, production of individual crops decrease by 10–38% under these climate change scenarios, with large uncertainties in spatial patterns that are determined by both the uncertainty in climate projections and the choice of impact model. This uncertainty in climate impact on crop productivity needs to be considered by economic assessments of climate change.     

Flood prone risk and amenity values: a spatial hedonic analysis

This study examines the impact of flood‐hazard zone location on residential property prices. The study utilises data from over 2000 private residential property sales occurred during 2006 in North Shore City, New Zealand. A spatial autoregressive hedonic model is developed to provide efficient estimates of the marginal effect of flood prone risks on property prices. Results suggest that the sale price of a residential property within a flood prone area is lower than an equivalent property outside the flood prone area. The flood plain location discount is reduced by the release of public information regarding flood risk.     

The Role of Index Trading in Price Formation in the Grains and Oilseeds Markets

We use both Granger‐causality and instrumental variables (IV) methods to examine the impact of index fund positions on price returns for the main US grains and oilseed futures markets. Our analysis supports earlier conclusions that Granger‐causal impacts are generally not discernible. However, market microstructure theory suggests trading impacts should be instantaneous. IV‐based tests for contemporaneous causality provide stronger evidence of price impact. We find even stronger evidence that changes in index positions can help predict future changes in aggregate commodity price indices. This result suggests that changes in index investment are in part driven by information which predicts commodity price changes over the coming months.     

Measuring the impact of road rehabilitation on spatial market efficiency in maize markets in Mozambique

This article analyzes the impact of road rehabilitation on the spatial market efficiency of maize markets in Mozambique. We estimate a modified version of the Parity Bounds Model (PBM) that allows us to test the impact of road rehabilitation on spatial efficiency. This article seeks to contribute to the existing literature in three ways. First, a unique data set, where road rehabilitation episodes between market pairs are identified, is developed. Second, special care is devoted to estimation of transaction costs due to the sensitivity of the PBM model to the quality of transaction costs estimates. Finally, as opposed to most existing literature that focuses on relatively distant markets, the article focuses on spatially closed markets. We find that maize markets tend to be segmented due to high transport costs. Following road rehabilitation, inefficiency and average absolute price differentials tend to decrease, and market pairs have tended to shift toward autarky regimes. Overall, while the results point broadly toward a positive impact of road rehabilitation on spatial efficiency, they are not as strong or as robust as one would like. Large increases in fuel prices likely offset the positive impacts of road rehabilitation on transaction costs, contributing to the increase in the probability of being in an autarky regime.     

The many dimensions of historic preservation value: national and local designation,internal and external policy effects

This analysis examines the internal and external policy effects of national and local register programmes for historic preservation. Robust hedonic pricing models are crucial to informing policy proposals and understanding how property markets relate to urban heritage. Estimating a repeat-sales hedonic model with neighbourhood trends and spatial mixed models, novel to this literature, offers a marked improvement in terms of jointly identifying internal and external policy effects, comparing national and local designations, separating policy from heritage effects and estimating models robust to spatial dependence and trends in hedonic prices. Historic designation variables, while often individually insignificant in the model, are always jointly significant in explaining varying appreciation rates. Local districts exhibit no consistent price impacts across the models. Being located inside a national district confers a price premium that increases over time in the preferred model specification, while prices fall in national districts’ buffers after designation. The sensitivity of results to model specification raises questions about alternative approaches to spatial dependence in the data in the urban historic preservation context. Evidence of the influence of historic district designation on property turnover and renovation investments is also examined.     

Agricultural water management and poverty in Ethiopia

The main focus of this article is to explore whether access to selected agricultural water management (AWM) technologies has led to significant reduction in poverty and, if they did so, to identify which technologies had higher impacts. In measuring impact we estimated the average treatment effect for the treated on crop income and measured the differences in consumption expenditures per adult equivalent of those with access and without access using matched data. The estimated average treatment effect was significant and amounted to USD 82 per season. Moreover, there was 24 less poverty incidence among users of AWM technologies compared to nonusers. All technologies were found to have significant poverty reducing impacts with micro dams, deep wells, river diversions, and ponds leading to 37%, 26%, 11%, and 9% reduction in poverty incidence compared to rainfed system. Finally, our study identified the most important correlates of poverty on the basis this we made the policy recommendations to build assets (AWM technologies, livestock, etc); to enhance human resource development and improve the functioning of labor markets for enhanced impact of AWM technologies on poverty.     

Do stronger intellectual property rights promote seed exchange: evidence from U.S. seed exports?

With increased private investment in crop breeding research in the developed world, intellectual property rights have gained importance in seed sector. Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)‐plus provisions included in recent free trade agreements between the developed and developing countries show a tendency of the developed world to impose their high standards for protection of plant intellectual property on the developing world. While stronger intellectual property rights can increase international exchange in seed, market power effect can lead to a reduction in exports of seed to foreign markets. This article estimates the impact of intellectual property rights on U.S. seed exports. The estimation is performed at a crop level using Heckman selection model. The results reveal that the impact of intellectual property rights varies across different types of crops—open‐pollinated, genetically modified, and hybrid crops. While TRIPS provisions are important to facilitate transfer of genetically modified crops, they play a minor role for open‐pollinated and hybrid crops. The results also show that plant breeders’ rights envisioned by the UPOV system can be important to promote seed exchange when proper mechanisms are put in place to enforce these rights.     

The interaction of speculators and index investors in agricultural derivatives markets

Through the analysis of the weekly Commodity Futures Trading Commission reports on 12 US traded agricultural commodities, we revisit the heated debate on the impact of index flows on commodities prices. After introducing a novel stock‐to‐use proxy that may be used to represent inventory variations at the intra‐month level, we show that speculators, contrary to index investors, are sensitive to commodity‐specific fundamental information. Their endogeneity to commodities markets hinders the estimation of their market impact. Regarding the market impact of index flows, the endogeneity problem is alleviated in two ways: first, we restrict the scope to agricultural commodities, for which index flows are more exogenous to market prices; second, we introduce two novel instrumental variables that are computed from index flows outside the market under analysis. We find that index investment flows are offset by commercial players, not speculators. The serial correlation of index flows may explain the tendency of speculators to synchronize with index investors. There is strong evidence of an index flows' impact in those commodities markets where speculative and index positions are the most correlated. The market impact of index flows is located in periods of liquidity stress, as is the correlation between speculative and index positions. Overall, our results demonstrate an impact of index investors on some agricultural prices and suggest that the synchronicity between speculative and index positions is an important determinant of this impact.     

Farmers' Perceived Costs of Wetlands: Effects of Wetland Size, Hydration, and Dispersion

We survey landowners to investigate the costs associated with the presence of permanent or seasonal wetland areas in cropland. We find, as predicted by our conceptual model, that dispersion of wetland areas imposes substantial inconvenience costs for producers but that costs respond nonlinearly and irregularly to changes in the frequency of hydration. Producer attitudes toward conservation and environmental regulation have a significant impact on perceived costs, as do some demographic attributes. The analysis suggests that incentives to aggregate dispersed wetlands into larger contiguous areas could benefit landowners and at the same time provide a net increase in wetland area.     

Do land price variation and environmental regulation improve chemical industrial agglomeration? A regional analysis in China

China’s governments have a strong control over resources, such as land resources, and determine environmental policies for the nation. As an essential part of the production cost of chemical enterprises, land price and pollution costs play a critical role in location selection. However, whether the current incompletely competitive industrial land market and improving environmental regulations in China would affect chemical industrial agglomeration (CIA) is unclear. This study incorporates the land price variations, environmental regulation, and CIA into one research framework. Calculation methods of industrial land price variation (LPV), environmental regulation (ERI), and CIA are established, to reveal their development level. Furthermore, a geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model is established to estimate the spatial and temporal impacts of land price variation and environmental regulation on CIA by using a panel data from 2007 to 2015. The results show significant spatial differences in the impacts of land price variation and environmental regulation on CIA between cities. The majority of the impacts of land price variation and environmental regulation on CIA are negative. However, the temporal change in the impacts are not as significant as the spatial change. Other control variables, namely, free trade, natural resources, and highway density, have a positive impact on CIA.     

The impact of agricultural conservation easement on nearby house prices: Incorporating spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity

The impact of farmland under agricultural conservation easement (ACE) contract on the values of nearby residential properties is investigated using housing sales data in two Pennsylvania counties. ACE-protected farmland had a positive impact on nearby property values in one study county but a negative impact in the other. The paper also looks at the impact of forest land use, and discovers that preserved forest land had a positive impact on the nearby property values in both counties. House prices showed strong spatial correlation in both counties, and a spatial error components (SEC) model fit the data better than the OLS model, a spatial-lag model (SLM), or a spatial autoregressive error model (SEM). Geographically weighted regression (GWR) showed that the impact of ACE-protected farmland on nearby property values varied within one of the two study counties, with positive impacts in some parts of the county and negative impacts in other parts. The impact of forest cover on property values also varied, with positive impacts within both counties. A new hybrid GWR-SEC model is introduced that incorporates both spatial correlation in prices and spatial heterogeneity in the model parameters. Statistical goodness of fit measures showed that the GWR-SEC model fit better than the GWR model or a hybrid GWR-SEM model.     

黄河下游滩区现状及存在问题分析

在叙述黄河下游滩区自然情况、社会经济情况、滩区治理现状的基础上，详细论述了黄河下游滩区存在的问题。由于黄河水沙问题复杂，治理难度大，滩区治理开发也受到限制，目前存在的主要问题是：1）洪水威胁依然存在；2）悬河形势严峻、河势尚未有效控制；3）滩区旱涝灾害严重；4）滩区产业结构单一；5）滩区政策落实不到位；6）滩区安全建设状况严重滞后。这些问题的存在，对滩区开发和管理产生很大的影响。     

AGRICULTURAL FLOOD ALLEVIATION BENEFIT ASSESSMENT: A CASE STUDY

The cost of flooding on farm land depends on land use, on the frequency, seasonality, duration and depth of flooding, and on water quality. This paper describes a method to calculate the average annual cost of flooding and the extra benefits or costs associated with given changes in flooding regime, illustrated by means of a simplified case study which examines the agricultural benefits of reduced summer flooding on grass in an area of environmental importance. Using hydrological and agro-economic data, the method derives the cost of individual flood events occurring in any one month for a given land use, weights these according to observed seasonality of flood flows, and derives average annual costs per hectare and for the floodplain as a whole for given levels of flood risk. The method is useful for appraising river flood alleviation schemes whereby the effects of changes in flood risk, flood seasonality or land use can be assessed.     

Water safety and spatial development: An institutional comparison between the United Kingdom and the Netherlands

The Netherlands and the United Kingdom are known for their different traditions of river flood risk management, which is reflected in their respective institutional frameworks. Whereas the Dutch have focused almost exclusively on reducing the probability of flooding by defining high safety standards, British flood managers are known for their propensity to influence spatial planning decisions as a means to reduce the potential impacts of flood events. This paper scrutinizes this alleged major difference in institutional arrangements and planning practices, so as to evaluate the room for elements of the risk approach in the Netherlands. Using Ostrom's IAD framework, we analyze the rules-in-use in two cases in which a new hospital is being planned in a flood-prone area. It will be shown that in spite of some important differences observed in the rules-in-use, the Dutch institutional configuration has absorbed several elements of the risk approach, and displays a higher similarity in planning practice to the UK than expected. It thus seems that Dutch flood risk management is gradually evolving into the direction of a more integral approach to water safety in spatial planning.     

The impact of mining and smelting activities on property values: a study of Mount Isa city,Queensland, Australia

Much publicity has been given to the problem of high levels of environmental contaminants, most notably high blood lead concentration levels among children in the city of Mount Isa because of mining and smelting activities. The health impacts from mining‐related pollutants are now well documented. This includes published research being discussed in an editorial of the Medical Journal of Australia (see Munksgaard et al. 2010 ). On the other hand, negative impacts on property prices, although mentioned, have not been examined to date. This study rectifies this research gap. This study uses a hedonic property price approach to examine the impact of mining‐ and smelting‐related pollution on nearby property prices. The hypothesis is that those properties closer to the lead and copper smelters have lower property (house) prices than those farther away. The results of the study show that the marginal willingness to pay to be farther from the pollution source is AUS $13 947 per kilometre within the 4 km radius selected. The study has several policy implications, which are discussed briefly. We used ordinary least squares, geographically weighted regression, spatial error and spatial autoregressive or spatial lag models for this analysis.     

Evaluating sustainability options in an agricultural frontier of the Amazon using multi-criteria analysis

Agricultural expansion and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon are driven by a complex interaction between economic and demographic drivers and institutional constraints. Land use policies such as Conservation Units and the Forest Code law should conserve biodiversity and other environmental aspects while, on the other hand, increasing commodity prices of beef and soy, driven by world markets provokes economic growth and expansion of the agricultural area. We carried out an impact assessment in eleven municipalities within an agricultural frontier along the road BR-163 that runs in the Brazilian Amazon states of Mato-Grosso and Pará. The impact assessment, covered a period between 2008 and 2020, showed that the autonomous development in the study area results in a strong increase in the performance of economic indicators but a reduction in environmental and some social indicators. The studied conservation policies are able to reduce negative environmental impacts to some extent, while hardly affecting economic and social indicators. The multi-criteria analysis (MCA) showed a trade-off relation between the economic and environmental dimension in such a way that the effect was much stronger in the high commodity price scenario than in the low price scenario. The policy implications of the MCA results are discussed in light of the institutional capacity of the Brazilian States under study, to implement effective conservation policies.     

Comparing the environmental impacts of pasture-based and confinement-based dairy systems in Nova Scotia (Canada) using life cycle assessment

A life cycle assessment (LCA) of dairy systems in Nova Scotia was conducted to compare environmental impacts of typical pasture and confinement operations. Data on material and energy inputs and outputs of these systems were obtained from local researchers and industry, and life cycle impacts in 11 categories were quantified. Use of concentrate feeds, N fertilizers, transport fuels and electricity were dominant contributors to environmental impacts. Somewhat surprisingly, grazing cows for five months per year (typical of pasture systems in Nova Scotia) had little effect on overall environmental impact. Scenario modelling suggests, however, that prolonged grazing is potentially beneficial. Compared with total confinement, a seven-month grazing scenario performed better in seven of the environmental impact categories evaluated with greatest potential improvements associated with acidification potential, ozone depletion potential, human toxicity and fresh water ecotoxicity. In contrast, land use was the only category in which an increased reliance on pasture is predicted to result in a marked increase in environmental impact.