AGRICULTURAL CONSERVATION POLICY AT A CROSSROADS

U.S. agricultural conservation policy has focused on a range of potential policy instruments centered on voluntary approaches tied into Depression-era commodity programs. Entering the twenty-first century, conservation policy is at a crossroads between more coercive regulatory policies, more costly voluntary programs, and more facilitative market-oriented policies. What are the pitfalls, advantages, disadvantages, and tradeoffs along these paths?Agricultural and Food Policy,

Equity and Justice in Global Warming Policy

Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such as the international Kyoto Protocol, post-Kyoto negotiations, regional initiatives, and unilateral actions. Although most studies on climate change policies in economics have considered efficiency aspects, there is a growing literature on equity and justice. Climate change policy has important dimensions of distributive justice, both within and across generations, but in this paper we survey only studies on the intragenerational aspect, i.e., within a generation. We cover several domains including the international, regional, national, sectoral and inter-personal, and examine aspects such as the distribution of burdens from climate change, climate change policy negotiations in general, implementation of climate agreements using tradable emission permits, and the uncertainty of alternatives to emission reductions.Economics of Climate Change, Intragenerational Equity, Distributive Justice

Agriculture’s Multifunctionality, Sustainability, and Social Responsibility

We investigate the question whether the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) could be used to replace or complement those of multifunctionality and sustainability in the agri-food sector. It shows that the double role of citizens as tax payers and customers requests and allows us to directly link the problems of governance and stakeholder society in an intertemporal framework of total value maximisation and sustainable development. Thus, the concept of CSR provides a link between the views on agriculture’s multifunctionality and sustainability. Moreover, the fact that some actors in a vertical market, such as the agri-food chain, can exercise market power and absorb tax money and resource rents enforces the need of a broader perspective which involves concern about addresses the social responsibilities and performance of all actors along this value chain.agricultural policy, multifunctionality, sustainability, social responsibility, market power., D62, D63, Q01, Q18,

Trade and the distributional politics of international labour standards

This paper constructs a simple general equilibrium model of the trade and distributional effects of spreading advanced country international labour standards to developing countries. Labour standards (including minimum safety requirements, prohibition of prison and child labour, and rights to unionise) are represented as a floor to the cost of employing labour. The model shows how the spread of standards affects the terms of trade and pattern of international specialisation, and can shift unskilled unemployment from advanced to developing countries, redistribute income among groups of factor owners in different countries. Political support for labour standards is predicted to come from a coalition of advanced country unskilled workers with insecure jobs and the secure unskilled in developing countries. Opposition is predicted from owners of other factors. Overall country lobbying positions in international forums will depend on the relative strengths of the groups within the country.Trade; International Labour Standards; Harmonization

Fiscal and distributional implications of property tax reforms in Indian cities.

The property tax is an important local revenue source in many countries, but it is often underused as a source for financing local expenditures. In India, many local governments have initiated administrative and valuation reforms to increase the yield from property taxes. In this paper, we examine the fiscal and distributional implication of the ongoing and potential assessment reforms in two Indian cities - Bangalore and Pune. While our findings are specific to these two cases, the reform efforts and underlying problems are epresentative of most urban local governments. Our main finding is that reform efforts that bring assessment of the property tax base closer to market values have significant positive impacts on revenue generation, and do not have adverse consequences in terms of the tax burden faced by the poor. Further, regulations such as rent control significantly impinge on the growth of revenues from the property tax and in fact do not serve the interests of the poor. While current assessment reforms are a good first step towards increasing the performance of the property tax, structural issues such as improved valuation, increasing buoyancy of the tax, and building taxpayer confidence need to be addressed to make these reforms sustainable.Property tax

Modelling Economic Impacts of Alternative International Climate Policy Architectures. A Quantitative and Comparative Assessment of Architectures for Agreement

This paper provides a quantitative comparison of the main architectures for an agreement on climate policy. Possible successors to the Kyoto protocol are assessed according to four criteria: economic efficiency; environmental effectiveness; distributional implications; and their political acceptability which is measured in terms of feasibility and enforceability. The ultimate aim is to derive useful information for designing a future agreement on climate change control.Climate Policy, Integrated Modelling, International Agreements

ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY VS. DISTRIBUTIVE EQUITY: THE "SAGEBRUSH REBELLION"

The purpose of this paper is to interpret, from the viewpoint of an economist, some of the causes of the ‘Sagebrush Rebellion,’ a contemporary land reform movement directed toward the Bureau of Land Management and its control of the public domain. Distributive equity concerns on the part of ‘Sagebrush Rebellion’ supporters are identified, as are the contributions of neoclassical welfare theory to the debate. Reflections of those social and theoretical concerns in Federal legislation and agency policy and regulations are explored.Land Economics/Use,