Journal: Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy

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Publisher

Wiley

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ISSN

2040-5790
2040-5804

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2022 - 202513
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Publications 1 - 10 of 13
  • Decent and equal work in agri‐food systems: Evidence from Peru
    Item type: Journal Article
    Fabry, Anna; Schuster, Monica; Maertens, Miet (2024)
    Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
    Agri-food systems are important sources of rural off-farm employment, but insights on job quality are limited. We study job quality in the Peruvian horticultural sector and explore the driving forces of decent and equal work, using survey data and econometric methods. We find structural disparities in wages and job quality between men and women and between local and migrant workers, trade-offs between wage and nonwage dimensions of decent work, and sector and company differences. Our findings contest that global value chains are a catalyst for decent and equal work and underscore the importance of formalization and government regulation of employment.
  • The effect of geographical denomination on the uptake of fungus-resistant grapes
    Item type: Journal Article
    Zachmann, Lucca; McCallum, Chloe; Finger, Robert (2025)
    Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
    Grape production for wine making is of great economic and cultural importance in Europe, but is heavily dependent on pesticides. Reducing pesticide use and associated risks is a policy goal in several countries, particularly in Europe. The most effective strategy to substantially reduce pesticide use in grape production is the planting of fungus-resistant varieties, which are less susceptible to common fungal infections and thus allow a massive reduction in pesticide treatments. However, their use remains low. One possible reason may be that planting new varieties may conflict with policies supporting geographical denomination systems, which tend to focus on traditional varieties. We provide the first study of how geographical denomination systems directly affect the adoption of fungus-resistant varieties. Using a novel and uniquely detailed dataset of 54,483 variety-level observations from 381 vineyards in Switzerland, we find that fungus-resistant grape varieties are 2% more likely to be adopted by growers if they can be sold under geographical denominations. Thus, expanding the eligibility of fungus-resistant varieties in geographical denomination lists could be a straightforward policy measure to stimulate their adoption. However, the effects are small, so complementary policies are needed.
  • No evidence of a rural‐urban divide in prioritizing agricultural policy goals
    Item type: Journal Article
    El Benni, Nadja; Finger, Robert; Irek, Judith; et al. (2025)
    Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
    Rural-urban divides have been found in various policy fields, but it remains unclear if they exist in agricultural policy. We analyzed the policy preferences of 1542 Swiss respondents, ranging from very rural to very urban. Respondents prioritized different pairs of conflicting goals, that is, two economic goals versus four conflicting agri-environmental goals. We find no evidence of a rural-urban divide in the prioritization of agricultural policy goals. Respondents prioritize economic goals over environmental goals. Efforts to make agriculture more environmentally sustainable do not per se create a rural-urban divide, but policies should focus on reducing trade-offs between economic and environmental goals.
  • Lessons to be learned in adoption of autonomous equipment for field crops
    Item type: Journal Article
    Lowenberg-DeBoer, James; Behrendt, Karl; Ehlers, Melf-Hinrich; et al. (2022)
    Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
    Autonomous equipment for crop production is on the verge of technical and economic feasibility, but government regulation may slow its adoption. Key regulatory issues include requirements for on-site human supervision, liability for autonomous machine error, and intellectual property in robotic learning. As an example of the impact of regulation on the economic benefits of autonomous crop equipment, analysis from the United Kingdom suggests that requiring 100% on-site human supervision almost wipes out the economic benefits of autonomous crop equipment for small and medium farms and increases the economies-of-scale advantage of larger farms.
  • Replications in agricultural economics
    Item type: Journal Article
    Finger, Robert; Grebitus, Carola; Henningsen, Arne (2023)
    Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
    Replicability is a cornerstone of all scientific disciplines. While agricultural economists often provide recommendations to stakeholders that inform, among others policymaking, we currently lack replication papers published in leading agricultural economics journals. This increases the risk that published results are not replicable, which potentially can lead to inefficient resource allocation. In this article, we provide a framework for replications in agricultural economics and discuss challenges and opportunities with the objective to foster a replication culture. We provide pathways on how to untap this potential and provide guidance for enabling a stronger emphasis on replications in the field of agricultural economics. We present the first special issue on replications in agricultural economics, which consists of 11 articles that replicate various empirical analyses presented in published articles and advance the analyses that were used in the original work to provide further insights.
  • Components of agricultural productivity change: Replication of US evidence and extension to the EU
    Item type: Journal Article
    Wimmer, Stefan; Dakpo, K. Hervé (2023)
    Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
    Increasing agricultural productivity is a policy priority in many countries. O'Donnell (Am. J. Agric. Econ. 94(4): 873–890, 2012) decomposed productivity change in US agriculture using a Lowe total factor productivity (TFP) index. We replicate the original study, assess its robustness to alternative TFP indices, and extend the analysis to EU agriculture. We consistently find that productivity growth in US agriculture is mainly driven by technical progress. In EU agriculture, TFP growth is less pronounced, and both technical change and efficiency change contribute to productivity changes. In both US and EU agriculture, the magnitude of measured productivity change varies across indices, highlighting the need to rely on multiple indices for robust policy recommendations.
  • Product differentiation, quality, and milk price stability: The case of the Swiss cheese market
    Item type: Journal Article
    Wang, Yanbing; Hug, Simon; Irek, Judith; et al. (2025)
    Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
    We investigate potential linkages between product and quality differentiation in the cheese markets and raw milk producer prices. We analyze the co-movements of producer prices of milk delivered to cheese processing channels with different differentiation strategies, namely industrial, artisanal, and artisanal cheese with geographical indications (GI) in the Swiss dairy market. We find that overall, product and quality differentiation in cheese markets helps milk producers achieve higher and more stable prices. Additional GI protection does not guarantee further enhancement of producer prices. Rather, its effectiveness may depend largely on the strength of GI protection and the governance of producer organizations.
  • Behavioral agricultural economics
    Item type: Journal Article
    Wüpper, David Johannes; Bukchin‐Peles, Shira; Just, David; et al. (2023)
    Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
    Agricultural and other fields of economics have always co-evolved and benefitted from each other's insights. Over time, a general convergence of all social sciences began, and various fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science started to overlap with general and agricultural economics. Within economics, it was especially the rise of behavioral economics, that has steered the field toward the other social sciences. It departs from the assumption of perfectly rational expected utility maximizers and allows for greater diversity in decision-makers' objectives and constraints. Agricultural economics has been early to recognize the need to make economic choice models more realistic. This can be explained by the particularities of agricultural economics and agriculture. Agricultural economists are tasked with solving specific, practical problems, and thus behavioral deviations from model predictions have always been salient and relevant to policy recommendations. Then, farmers—and to some extent also consumers—make choices in particularly complex and uncertain environments and must use all strategic tools at their disposal to deal with their “bounded rationality”. These include the reliance on culture and other heuristics. Agricultural economics continues to synergize economic theory and practice with insights from other disciplines and real-world experiences and is an important driver towards further unification of all social sciences.
  • Action‐ versus results‐based policy designs for agricultural climate change mitigation
    Item type: Journal Article
    Kreft, Cordelia; Finger, Robert; Huber, Robert (2023)
    Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
    Reducing agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is key to achieve overall climate policy goals. Effective and efficient policy instruments are needed to incentivize farmers' adoption of on-farm climate change mitigation practices. We compare action- and results-based policy designs for GHG reduction in agriculture and account for farmers' heterogeneous behavioral characteristics such as individual farming preferences, reluctance to change and social interactions. An agent-based bio-economic modeling approach is used to simulate total GHG reduction, overall governmental spending and farm-level marginal abatement cost of Swiss dairy and beef cattle farms under both action- and results-based policy designs. We find that total governmental spending associated with the compared policy designs depends on the cost and benefits of the considered measures as well as behavioral characteristics of farmers. More precisely, if farmers are reluctant to change, additional incentives are needed to increase adoption of a win-win measure. In such a case, targeting the payment on the cost of that particular measure (action-based design) instead of paying a uniform amount for abated emissions (results-based design) can lower governmental spending for agricultural climate change mitigation. Farm-level marginal cost of reducing GHG emissions are lower with results-based payments independent of the cost of measures. Moreover, we find that farmers' individual preferences and reluctance to change substantially lower the adoption of mitigation measures and hence overall GHG reduction potential of farms.
  • Economics of herbicide‐free crop production
    Item type: Journal Article
    Ziehmann, Eileen; Möhring, Niklas; Finger, Robert (2024)
    Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
    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.
Publications 1 - 10 of 13