Journal: Agricultural Economics

Abbreviation

Agric. econ.

Publisher

Wiley

Journal Volumes

ISSN

0169-5150
1574-0862

Description

Filters

2021 - 20255
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Publications 1 - 5 of 5
  • Policy for Decent Work in Agriculture
    Item type: Journal Article
    Meemken, Eva-Marie; Aremu, Olayinka; Fabry, Anna; et al. (2025)
    Agricultural Economics
    The agricultural sector offers employment for a large share (1/8) of the global population, yet there are various employment challenges, including precarious working conditions and labor market frictions, contributing to labor shortages in some-and unemployment in other-regions. It remains unclear which policy tools are best suited to address these challenges as the extant evidence is scattered, limited, and lacks a comprehensive overview of policy options. Here, we fill this gap by offering the first literature review on this topic, unraveling the complexity of employment challenges, providing an overview of policy tools, and proposing a policy and research agenda. Our overview shows that a bundle of coherent, national, and international policies is needed to address the interconnected and global nature of employment challenges in agriculture. Many such tools are available but few of them have been rigorously evaluated, often because suitable data are lacking. Our contribution is timely, given the surge in public interest in social sustainability, the proliferation of policies for decent work in agriculture, and limited research guiding these efforts.
  • Climate and soil conditions shape farmers’ climate change adaptation preferences
    Item type: Journal Article
    Stetter, Christian; Cronauer, Carla (2025)
    Agricultural Economics
    Climate change poses a significant threat to agriculture and challenges farmers’ adaptive capacity. Understanding how farmers evaluate and prioritize different climate change adaptation measures under consideration of their natural environment is crucial yet widely overlooked. This study determines the relative importance that farmers attach to different adaptation measures and explores the role of climatic and soil conditions in this context. It uses a best-worst scaling experiment with German arable farmers in combination with geospatial climate and soil information. Findings reveal a preference for incremental adaptation measures over more transformative ones. However, preferences varied considerably with average local temperature, precipitation, and soil quality. The finding that farmers’ adaptation preferences are highly diverse and context-specific calls for tailored policies. It is crucial for policymakers to have a thorough understanding of farmers’ adaptation preferences. Based on the results, the study discusses multiple actions that policymakers can take to incentivize farmers to favor more effective adaptation measures.
  • Drought risk management in agriculture: A copula perspective on crop diversification
    Item type: Journal Article
    Schmitt, Jonas; Offermann, Frank; Ribeiro, Andreia F.S.; et al. (2024)
    Agricultural Economics
    Drought events are a major cause of large crop yield losses with implications for food security and farmers’ incomes. Growing multiple crops simultaneously during a cropping season is a well-known on-farm risk management strategy to cope with these drought risks. However, the effectiveness of this crop diversification under different severity levels of drought and how this effectiveness is influenced by the crop composition is unclear. This article provides new methodological and empirical insights to assess the effectiveness of such diversification, in particular to cope with extreme drought. We apply and evaluate nested Archimedean copulas and elliptical copulas to assess simultaneous farm-level yield losses of different cash crops in German agriculture (winter wheat, winter barley, winter rapeseed, sugar beet, and grain maize) under different drought severity levels (N = 249,756; regionally pooled farm-level crop-yield pairs, 1995–2019). We show that on-farm crop diversification contributes to cope with drought risks, but its effectiveness varies considerably across regions, crop pairs, and drought severity. Our results underline that cropping system diversification alone is often not sufficient to cope with drought risks, but that the right crop combinations are needed. For example, during a severe drought (one in 20 years event), 26.4% of farmers in eastern Germany suffered simultaneous yield losses of at least 20% in winter wheat and winter barley, while 19.1% of farmers in eastern Germany suffered simultaneous yield losses of at least 20% in winter wheat and sugar beet. Farmers should therefore be encouraged to grow crops with more diverse phenological requirements throughout the year.
  • Europe's ambitious pesticide policy and its impact on agriculture and food systems
    Item type: Journal Article
    Finger, Robert (2024)
    Agricultural Economics
    European countries have set ambitious policy goals to reduce the risks of pesticides to the environment and human health. European agriculture could play a leading role in the transition to a low pesticide risk future, with various societal benefits. However, such a transition also involves trade-offs, costs, and risks for farmers and society. Here, we summarize possible implications for agriculture and food systems in Europe and beyond and discuss avenues for future research.
  • Preferences, personality, aspirations, and farmer behavior
    Item type: Journal Article
    Knapp, Ladina; Wüpper, David Johannes; Finger, Robert (2021)
    Agricultural Economics
    There is a growing literature that incorporates not only economic preferences, such as risk preferences, but also personality and aspirations into economic choice models. Here, we investigate how these concepts relate to each other and can explain observed economic choices. More specifically, we explore the role of risk preferences, personality (self-efficacy and locus of control), and aspirations for farmers’ choices to adopt preventive measures against pests, buy cropinsurance, and to be entrepreneurially active. To this end, a sample of 568 Swiss fruit growers is analyzed. We find that for the adoption of preventive measures against pests, the best predictors are the farmers’ locus of control and their aspirations. For crop insurance demand, all behavioral variables, and especially risk preferences, contribute to explain farmers’ choices. For farmers’ entrepreneurial choice, we find that locus of control and their risk preferences are the best predictors. Our results reveal considerable domain specificity of preferences, personality, and aspirations in economic choice models.
Publications 1 - 5 of 5