A broad range of agriculture-environment interactions can be organized around the concept of agriculture as a producer and consumer of ecosystem services. Viewed as capital assets, ecosystems embody production technologies that are valuable, complex, and often poorly understood. The quantity and...

Agricultural commodities are typically produced over an extensive spatial area and are costly to transport relative to their total value. These characteristics yield a complex set of spatial price linkages which are often studied to gain insights into the performance of markets. An extensive...

This chapter first discusses what economists mean by "the incidence of agricultural policy" and why we care about it. Then it reviews models of the determinants of the differential incidence of different policies among interest groups such as suppliers of factors of production, consumers,...

Based on an economy-wide perspective, this paper begins with a discussion of the bias against exports and agriculture that characterized the economic literature and the development strategies in many developing countries after World War II. This is followed by an analysis of how the...

Agricultural research and extension programs have been built in most of the world's economies. A substantial number of economic impact studies evaluating the contributions of research and extension programs to increased farm productivity and farm incomes and to consumer welfare have been...

This chapter studies second-best models of nutritional externalities, credit, and incomplete markets for risk, developing implications for welfare-improving government policy using primitive economic building blocks. Using a simple model of altruism wherein the rich obtain utility from the...

Extension of factual and analytical work to policy issues has been a feature of agricultural economics from its beginnings, but only in recent decades have these efforts become part of the scientific core of what agricultural economists do. At the same time, the range of policy analysis has...

The chapter reviews the generation and adoption of new technologies in the agricultural sector. The first section describes models of induced innovation and experimentation, considers the political economy of public investments in agricultural research, and addresses institutions and public...