A pollution reduction program is designed where information about both technology and risk preferences is asymmetric. Program costs and the distribution of payments depend on the amount of information known to the policy maker. Empirically testable conditions for self-selection are derived; the...

For some time the over-pumping of groundwater by aquacultural producers has contributed to severe problems with land subsidence in many areas of Taiwan. This has led to policy initiatives that impose extra costs on groundwater users. By investigating the effects of the conditions of aquifers,...

Weakening demand for livestock and dairy produce, historically high prices for feed ingredients and increasingly strict regulations on animal waste management continue to put significant pressure on livestock and dairy operating margins. In this paper, we use representative farm mathematical...

This article proposes a method to accommodate asymmetric information on farmers' risk preferences in designing voluntary environmental policies. By incorporating stochastic efficiency rules in a mechanism design problem, the government can find incentive-compatible policies by knowing only the...

A previous "EuroChoices" (Vol. 7, No. 1) compared and contrasted approaches to rural development policy in the EU and US. This Special Issue focuses on the evaluation of these policies, drawing on a workshop held in June 2009 at OECD Conference Center in Paris. Evaluation is an activity that...

In seeking appropriate economic policies to address non-trade concerns (NTC), a distinction must be made between those concerns that relate to market failure and the misallocation of resources, and those that relate to distributional issues. To deal with both types of NTC, domestic policies are...

We forecast the economic consequences of a widespread contamination of the food system based on a hypothetical outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). Since the immediate effect on the livestock sector could affect the entire supply chain and US livestock, meat and dairy exports, we measure...