Greenhouse gas emissions reduction policies and trade, cropland responses to incentives, rice farmer efficiency
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The first essay examines the effects of potential EU and USA greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) policies that are unilateral or bilateral and with or without export exemptions. An existing partial equilibrium model of the global agricultural market, called Aglink-Cosimo, is employed to conduct a simulation analysis. Major results are as follows. First, unilateral or bilateral GHG policies tend to increase prices in the domestic and world markets and decrease production and trade quantity, although the effects vary depending on commodity and country. Also, moving from a unilateral to a bilateral policy can cause significant trade diversion but does not have a large impact on the domestic market. Finally, GHG policies can induce carbon leakage, and how border adjustments are designed is important to mitigate carbon leakage. The second essay estimates the area elasticities for 10 countries or regions for most crops using the Bayesian methods to ensure that the results are consistent with the expectations suggested by the economic theory and applied economics. The results show that the area responses are different depending on crops and countries or regions. This study also tests partial adjustment and limitations on the total area responsiveness. As a result, including lagged area as an independent variable affects some crop's area response. Also, setting an upper bound has a large impact on the United States area responses, but does not on Brazil. These results imply that it is proper to use different area elasticities depending on the form and structure of global crop models. The third study estimates the technical and environmental inefficiency of Korean rice farms and relates to potentially competing societal objectives to maximize food production or to minimize greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The results show that putting all priority on output efficiency, the expected practice of a profit-maximizing firm, increases GHG emissions. If instead environmental efficiency is the sole focus, then some farms do not need to reduce rice production to reduce GHG emissions. However, more than half of the farms in the sample experience a decrease in rice production in this case. The exact impacts are found to depend on social-environmental variables such as age and regional dummies. We go farther and estimate each farm's relative prioritization of these two outcomes based on their actual choices. Farms are found to put more weight on rice production than the environmental outcome, although the move of the weight from economic to environmental outcomes might lead to a reduction of GHG emissions without a large economic loss. However, farms located in urban areas place a significantly higher weight on environmental outcomes than farms in other regions.
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Ph. D.