How Do Health and Social Insurance Programmes Affect the Land and Labour Allocations of Farm Households? Evidence from Taiwan

To protect farmers from health care costs and risks to livelihood, most countries have developed special health and social insurance programmes specifically for farmers. While numerous studies have examined the determinants of participation in these programmes, little is known about how they influence famers' land and labour allocations. Without government‐sponsored health and social insurance, farmers may seek off‐farm employment in order to obtain similar benefits. Conditioning eligibility for social insurance on minimum land holdings and on‐farm work days can lead to delayed retirement and other forms of job lock. We investigate these issues using a unique dataset of 703,287 farms in Taiwan. After controlling for non‐random participation in Taiwan's social insurance programme, we find that the programme increases (decreases) on (off) farm labour supply, and decreases the amount of set‐aside land. This suggests that payments from social insurance substitute for those issued through land set‐aside programmes to some extent, and that failing to account for this substitution increases the cost of achieving both programmes' objectives.     

Did the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act Alter Farm Enterprise Diversification?

We estimate how much United States farms changed enterprise diversification in response to a marked increase in crop insurance coverage brought about by the 1994 Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act, which substantially increased insurance subsidies. The analysis exploits farm‐level panel census data to compare farm‐specific changes in enterprise diversification over time. By examining diversification decisions of the same farms over time, we control for time‐invariant unobserved individual heterogeneity. We then use pooled cross‐sectional data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Resource Management Survey to estimate the relationship between farm diversification and average returns. We find that the insurance subsidies caused a modest increase in enterprise specialisation and production efficiency. Estimated efficiency gains are far less than the subsidies.     

How has microcredit supported agriculture? Evidence using panel data from Bangladesh

Improving agricultural productivity has received a greater attention in recent years amid concerns about rising food insecurity, population pressures, and climate change. Many believe that better access to institutional credit, spanning microcredit as well as commercial and agricultural banks, can help rural households smooth risks, and access inputs and other technology to modernize agriculture and improve farm/nonfarm linkages. We use recently augmented household panel data spanning over 20 years in Bangladesh to examine the effects of rural credit expansion (both microcredit and formal bank channels) on outcomes for agricultural households. We find that microcredit has benefited households with lower landownings, raising agricultural income from activities such as livestock rearing that require less land, as well as nonfarm income diversification for all households, but with the strongest effect for landless or near‐landless households. We do not find effects of microcredit on crop income, but do, however, find that reported supply‐side credit constraints significantly lower crop income. Borrowing by both men and women has contributed to nonfarm income growth for marginal farmers, but only men's borrowing has contributed to nonfarm income growth among higher landowning groups.     

Does the Decoupling Reform Affect Agricultural Employment in Sweden? Evidence from an Exogenous Change

This study uses aggregated municipality data, for the years 2001–2009, to explore whether direct payments to farmers affect agricultural employment in Swedish municipalities. The decoupling reform in 2005 included a new grassland support payment accompanied by management obligations that had unexpectedly high redistributive consequences as it greatly increased common agricultural policy payments to municipalities with large areas of grassland. In some municipalities, total payments more than doubled. Thus, since the reform seems exogenous to the behaviour of farmers and the regional economy, the reform can be used to identify a subsidy effect. We find that a permanent increase in agricultural employment can be attributed to the new grassland support. Our results indicate that the grassland support generates an additional job at a cost of SEK 250,000, relative to the average agricultural wage of SEK 333,000. However, the subsidy effect is largely keeping jobs in agriculture, i.e. the grassland support may be slowing down the process of structural change in grassland regions.     

How effective is a fat subsidy? Evidence from edible oil consumption in India

Taxes on fats and sugar-sweetened beverages are deployed in the developed world to encourage healthier diets. How effective might such fiscal instruments be in emerging economies? We evaluate the impacts of a subsidy for palm oil, introduced as part of the public distribution system in three Indian states. Using variants of the difference-in-differences approach, we find that palm oil consumption increased, particularly in rural areas, as a result of the subsidy, and traditional oils were displaced by cheaper palm oil. However, the intervention did not significantly alter overall edible oil consumption. These results are robust to different specifications, alternative estimation samples, and the exclusion of households who may have been potential beneficiaries of other interventions. Impacts were higher in Tamil Nadu than in other states, and were higher for vegetarian households in rural areas. There was only weak evidence of spillover income effects on other food groups. Given India's dual burden of malnutrition, our analysis suggests that fiscal policy interventions have the potential to effectively nudge consumer choices towards healthier edible oil consumption.     

How Do Cultural Worldviews Shape Food Technology Perceptions? Evidence from a Discrete Choice Experiment

Agricultural biotechnology (genetic modification) has encountered resistance from many consumers, resulting in disparate regulatory approaches across different jurisdictions. The recent advent of CRISPR-Cas9, or gene editing, offers the potential for significant improvements in plant breeding. However, little is known currently about consumer responses to the technology. A factor often omitted from previous economic analyses of consumer acceptance of new food technologies is underlying human values or worldviews. Drawing upon cultural cognition theory and using data from a survey of Canadian consumers, we examine the influence of cultural values on food choice behaviours. Respondents’ pre-existing cultural values are measured on two dimensions: hierarchy-egalitarianism and individualism-communitarianism. Choice behaviours are captured using a discrete choice experiment featuring a sliced apple product with two consumer-oriented attributes (non-browning and antioxidant-enhanced) and three novel food technologies (gene editing, genetic modification, edible coating). Using a random parameters logit model with error components we find pre-existing cultural values to be significant determinants of choice behaviours. Individuals pre-disposed towards a hierarchical worldview are more accepting of novel food technologies, as are individuals with a communitarian worldview. While the use of gene editing results in negative marginal utilities in a food choice situation, the effect is not as large as with genetic modification, suggesting there is scope to ameliorate potentially negative reactions to the technology with value-compatible messages.     

Are agro-clusters pro-poor? Evidence from Ethiopia

Governments and development agencies increasingly promote agro-clusters as a pathway to improving smallholder incomes and ensuring inclusive rural development through mitigating production and market risks. However, there is very limited empirical evidence to support this promise. We use a large farm household survey of about 4000 smallholder farmers in Ethiopia growing cereals like teff, maize, wheat, maltbarley and sesame to examine the relationship between agro-clusters and smallholder welfare and poverty. Using instrumental variable estimators, we establish a positive association between agro-clusters, household income and per capita income. Agro-clusters are also shown to reduce poverty and poverty gaps. Our results are robust over different agro-cluster proxies and alternative estimators, such as the augmented inverse probability weighting estimator. We also show that our findings are unlikely to be driven by omitted variable bias. Moving beyond average effects and in the interest of understanding heterogeneous effects, we use quantile regressions at different income levels. We find that agro-clusters are associated with welfare gains for all households. However, the most significant gains are observed for the wealthier households. Despite this regressive association, our findings suggest that agro-clusters may be useful in making farming more profitable with significant welfare implications.     

How did a network of marine protected areas impact adjacent fisheries? Evidence from Australia

Marine‐protected areas (MPAs) are an effective means of improving habitat quality and biodiversity in the world’s oceans. While the advantages of MPAs as a mechanism for conservation and biodiversity are well established, the potential improvements to fishery performance resulting from a network of MPAs are still being established. Countries around the world have committed to establishing networks of MPAs within their waters by 2020, in response to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. This, coupled with the increasing global demand for seafood and heavy reliance on fishery resources as a source of economic development for many coastal communities, means that an understanding of how these networks can be expected to impact fishery performance is extremely important. We use a difference‐in‐difference modelling approach to isolate the change in the fishery performance associated with the south‐east marine reserve network in Australia. We find no evidence that the economic performance of adjacent fisheries was negatively impacted by the network. This lack of impact is likely due to a network design explicitly intended to avoid effort displacement in key fisheries, along with fishery management changes intended to remove excess fishing capacity.     

When do Agricultural Exports Help the Rural Poor? A Political-economy Approach

Many economists have argued that agricultural exports should be one of the best ways to reduce rural poverty in developing countries, through the creation of productive employment in the rural areas. Non-economists have tended to be sceptical, often seeing such exports as competitive with food crops and thus potentially threatening to an adequate supply of food. The historical record includes many cases in which the prospect of profitable agricultural exports prompted the rich/powerful to appropriate land formerly occupied by lower income agricultural workers, often squatters or people with traditional land rights. That record, as currently understood, leaves it unclear whether such exports have more frequently brought benefits to the rural poor or hurt them. An adequate model of the poverty effects of agricultural exports must thus take account of how control of land (and labour as well) may be shifted among groups without compensation as it becomes more valuable. Two major issues/questions are of current interest. First, have the unjust mechanisms whereby the rich wrested valuable resources from the poor in the past become less common? Second, is there evidence that the sort of labour-intensive agricultural exports most likely to benefit the poor are growing fast enough to suggest an important poverty effect at present and in the future? More in-depth research is needed to clarify both points. For the present, it appears unlikely that agricultural exports will be a major source of poverty reduction for the rural poor in the Third World taken as a whole.     

How land transfer marketization influence on green total factor productivity from the approach of industrial structure? Evidence from China

Market-oriented allocation of land resources is one of the main economic reforms in China. However, the influence of land transfer marketization (LTM) on green total factor productivity (green TFP) and its mechanisms remain unknown. Based on panel data of 30 provincial administrative regions in China from 2004 to 2016, this study attempts to establish mechanism among LTM, industrial structure and green TFP, which is measured by the Slack Based Measure DEA (SBM-DEA) model containing undesirable output, and empirically estimates the impact of LTM, the rationalization and optimization of industrial structure and their interactions on green TFP further. The results show that: 1) LTM has a significant promoting effect on the improvement of green TFP in China, and the effect is also significant in the eastern, central and western regions as well, indicating that the application of land transfer policy to regulate regional economic development is widespread in China. 2) The rationalization of industrial structure has significantly promoted the development of green TFP in China, as well as at the regional levels, and the effect decreases from the western region to the central and eastern regions. The optimization of industrial structure also has a promoting effect on green TFP in China and all the regions, but the regional differences of the effect are contrary to that of the rationalization of industrial structure, with a decreasing trend from the eastern region to the central and western regions. 3) The interaction between LTM and the rationalization of industrial structure has significantly inhibited the improvement of green TFP in China, and the regional variations of the restraining effect are higher in the western region, followed by the central and eastern regions. The interaction between LTM and the optimization of industrial structure also has a negative effect on green TFP in China, and the regional variations of the effect showing the decreasing trend from the eastern region to the western and central regions. Therefore, China should continue to adhere to the market-oriented urban land transfer system reform, actively play the role of the government in the industrial upgrading and industrial transfer, and formulate a differentiated land transfer system and industrial development policies based on the economic development and industrial characteristics of various regions, so as to achieve the sustainable development of China’s economy and society.     

How do informal farmland rental markets affect smallholders’ well‐being? Evidence from a matched tenant–landlord survey in Malawi

We estimate the efficiency and equity returns to farmland rental markets in Malawi using a matched tenant–landlord survey of smallholder farm households in four districts. Our sample allows us to more fully observe the landlord side of the rental market, which is almost always missing in previous studies. Our results suggest that land rental markets promote efficiency by facilitating a net transfer of land to more productive farmers. We also find that land rental markets promote equity as conventionally defined in the land markets literature, that is, by transferring land from land‐rich households to land‐poor households, and from labor‐poor to labor‐rich households. However, our study identifies some important challenges for land rental markets in this context. First, we find that tenants in our sample are wealthier than their landlord counterpart on average in all dimensions other than landholding. In addition, most landlords report the motive for renting out their land as either the need for immediate cash, or the lack of labor and/or capital to cultivate the plot that was rented out. These findings align with concerns about potential “stress renting” by poor landlords and suggest the value of defining equity along a broader set of dimensions other than simply equalizing the distribution of farmland and labor.     

Can the State Foster Food Sovereignty? Insights from the Case of Ecuador

This paper contributes to the discussion on food sovereignty and the state by analysing the case of Ecuador. It presents a theoretical framework and literature review focused on the question of food sovereignty, the state and agrarian political economy. The case study of Ecuador, one of a handful of countries that has attempted to institutionalize food sovereignty in state policy, examines the political processes that led to the institutionalization of food sovereignty and the rural development and agricultural policies of the ‘post‐neoliberal’ government of Rafael Correa. The analysis of the Ecuadorian case concludes that the implementation of public policies reflecting food sovereignty principles has largely proven elusive, with the exception of some institutional changes and developments at the local levels of the state.     

How does off-farm work affect chemical fertilizer application? Evidence from China’s mountainous and plain areas

There is a rising concern that the ongoing wave of off-farm employment will have profound effects on agriculture-based environment problems-measured by the intensity of chemical fertilizer (CF) usage. Yet, our understanding of the regional heterogeneities of this effect remains scant. This research gap is addressed by using panel data of selected cities in Sichuan and Henan provinces in China, which are representative mountainous and plain regions respectively, to empirically examine the impact of off-farm employment on CF use. Our findings indicated that there exists an inverted “U” shaped relationship between off-farm employment and CF use in the mountainous region, whereas CF use is positively correlated with off-farm employment in the plain area. The increased CF inputs, which resulted from the substitution effect and remittance effect, can compensate for the negative effect of labor loss, while land marginalization is the main reason for the decrease in CF consumption at the later stage of urbanization in the mountainous region. Meanwhile, the deagriculturalization of farmers’ employment patterns decreases the intensity of CF usage, which resulted from the scale effect produced by land transfer and large-scale management in the plain region. Besides, the evolution pattern of this effect may present a similar trend in these provinces, but the turning point of plain regions would appear later than that of mountainous areas due to the inherently unique physical conditions and socio-ecological contexts. Based on the empirical results of this paper, some policy recommendations are provided.     

How do institutional market players matter in farmland pricing?

In this paper we analyse how institutional sellers within the privatisation process shape price formation in agricultural land markets by taking the German reunification as an example. These institutions sell the formerly state owned land within first-price sealed bid auctions, publish calls and obtained prices, and are hypothesised to exploit their market power. Based on the conceptual framework of hedonic pricing models, we use a spatio-temporal modelling approach to empirically quantify these impacts. We thereby control for land productivity characteristics, potential buyers and whether farmers purchase the land. We find that privatisation agencies sell at significantly higher prices, while one agency sells at lower prices to farmers.     

Do remittances support consumption during crisis? Evidence from Kosovo

This paper focuses on the effect of remittances on per capita consumption over time in a context of conflict, war-to-peace transition and crisis. We use two household surveys from Kosovo with unique timing, one collected immediately after the civil war in 2000 and the other during the economic crisis in 2010. This territory, in which the tension among ethnic groups is the focus of international concern, is one of the top remittance-receiving countries in the world. We examine the effect of remittances not only at the average level of consumption, but also at various parts of the distribution of consumption using quantile regressions. We find that remittances alleviate poverty by enhancing the consumption level of the most vulnerable households, and the positive effect of remittances on consumption has remained constant between 2000 and 2010. This result may be connected with the resilience of remittances.     

Young farmers’ support under the Common Agricultural Policy and sustainability of rural regions: Evidence from Lithuania

The present study examines the influence of young farmers’ support system including both direct payments for young farmers and rural development measures initiatives under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the sustainability of rural regions. The intentions and decisions taken by young farmers in Lithuania are analysed within the rural sustainability concept. The empirical analysis relies on the questionnaire survey. In order to disentangle the possible effects of the CAP support on the farming sustainability (as it is perceived by the young farmers), we consider payments for farm establishment and expansion along with support for advisory services. The results show that young farmers’ support system under the CAP has the strongest perceived effect on income support in Lithuania without significant differences across different groups of farmers. The effect on investments is significantly lower for crop farms if opposed to the other farming types. Still, the results also indicate that environmental awareness of Lithuanian farmers is rather low as the demand for such advisory services appeared to be relatively low. The relatively high demand for advisory services on the business plan preparation suggests low levels of business administration and marketing skills among the young farmers, which indicates the need for development of the social dimension.     

Do vouchers improve government fertilizer distribution? Evidence from Nigeria

Government distribution of subsidized fertilizer in Sub‐Saharan Africa is often characterized by cumbersome administrative processes and diversion of the product from the proclaimed beneficiaries. This study uses propensity score matching techniques to analyze an input voucher program in Nigeria that was meant to demonstrate an alternative and more efficient distribution mechanism for subsidized fertilizer. We find that participants in the 2009 voucher program received more bags of subsidized fertilizer than nonparticipants and also paid significantly lower prices compared to those who purchased directly from the market. On average, however, participating in the voucher program did not improve the timeliness of fertilizer receipt or the quality of the product. Where statistically significant, participating in the program increased the likelihood that the product was received late and that some complaint about the product's quality was made. As many developing countries; particularly in Sub‐Saharan Africa adopt the use of input vouchers or scale up already existing programs, this study demonstrates when the distribution of subsidized fertilizer via vouchers improves farmers’ timely access to good and more affordable fertilizer. It highlights some key issues to be considered in order to expand the dimensions of success of well‐targeted input voucher programs     

Is off-farm income reforming the farm? Evidence from Mexico

Does access to off-farm income complement or compete with agricultural production? This article explores the effect of off-farm income on agricultural production activities, using data from the 2003 Mexico National Rural Household Survey. We first discuss the theoretical conditions under which access to off-farm income may influence production in an agricultural household model. Instrumental-variable (IV) estimation methods are then used to test whether agricultural production activities, technologies, and input use differ between households with and without access to off-farm income. We find that off-farm income has a negative effect on agricultural output and the use of family labor on the farm, but a positive impact on the demand for purchased inputs. There is also a slight efficiency gain in households with access to off-farm income. Findings offer insights into how household production evolves as rural households increasingly engage in off-farm income activities.     

In School or at Work? Evidence from a Crisis

This paper makes use of the income variability generated by the macroeconomic crisis of 2001/2002 to examine schooling outcomes in Argentina. The effect of this macroeconomic swing is examined with a focus on whether the income or substitution effect dominates in the decision-making of young people. It is demonstrated that the probability of being in school was 6.5–10 percentage points higher in May 2002 than in 2001 for 15–18-year-olds. This is probably the largest (positive) effect found in the developing country literature so far and is comparable to the effect of a 10% increase in household income. For 19–25-year-olds, the probability is between 2 and 6 percentage points higher. Results are robust to a wide range of controls and specification checks. Difference-in-difference panel estimation corroborates these findings and shows that the increase in schooling seems to be driven by a decrease in school exits during the crisis.     

Do Chinese farmers benefit from farmland leasing choices? Evidence from a nationwide survey

Using China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this study investigates factors associated with the choice of farmland leasing strategies and the impact of leasing options on farm performance. Particular attention is given to off‐farm employment and farm subsidies. Additionally, the study applies a selectivity‐based approach to assess the relationship between farmland leasing choices and farm businesses’ performance. Off‐farm employment, older and educated operators, large farms and old‐age pension plans increase the likelihood of leasing out farmland. Part‐time off‐farm employment, grain subsidies and mechanised farms increase the likelihood of leasing in farmland. Finally, the selectivity correction terms in the value of crop production are significantly negative in the choices of farmland leasing, indicating the presence of sample selection effects. Accounting for selectivity is essential to ensure unbiased and consistent estimates.