This study formally links the literature on R&D-driven productivity growth to studies which examine GHG emission benefits from increased farm productivity growth. Using a global agricultural model and estimates from the literature, this study examines the impact of greater US public agricultural R&D spending over 2025−2035. The results show that roughly doubling public R&D investments in US agriculture could provide greater economic gains relative to its costs over the period 2017−2050. The GHG mitigation co-benefits from these investments also can be enhanced by combining R&D policies with strategies aimed at directly reducing farm inputs.

This paper empirically investigates the economic effects of environmental activities. To be specific, it investigates the interactive influence of firms' environmental management and environmental innovation on their productivity. We consider both internal and external environmental management practices of global firms observed from 41 countries between 2017 and 2019. We also consider both inputs and outputs of firms' innovation activities that aim to reduce environmental impacts. Multiple indices are constructed to comprehensively evaluate firms' environmental activities, and productivity is estimated with a semi-parametric method. We find that environmental management and environmental innovation are directly correlated to each other and both substantially promote productivity; however, they tend to substitute each other's positive effects on productivity. Other variables such as globalization, government, labor inputs, and informal competition strongly affect firm productivity too.

This study examines the factors influencing women farmers’ choice of adaptation strategies to reduce the negative impacts of climate change and the effects of these strategies on household income and food insecurity. A field survey was conducted among 426 women farmers in the Center-North region, which covers 7% of Burkina Faso territory. Descriptive statistics, a multinomial logit model, and a propensity score matching model were used to analyze the data collected. The results of the econometric analysis show that high domestic tasks, type of climate shocks experienced, membership in women’s group, and financial constraints are important determinants of adaptation decisions. Adaptation strategies are also found to have a positive impact on income and a negative impact on household food insecurity. These different findings highlight the need to prioritize flexible adaptation options to improve women farmers’ resilience to climate change, rather than generic solutions.

How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production, while at the same time being energized by it? How do the historically informed, lived experiences of rural e-commerce entrepreneurs or workers in China help reconceptualize digital labor and platform studies? Deploying the analytic of platformized family production, this article addresses these questions through a deep description of the experiences of variously positioned platform-based and mediated laborers in an e-commerce village in East China. I argue that the ongoing process of platformizing family production is profoundly contradictory. As an alternative to a model of development based on unevenness and the rural-urban divide, village e-commerce has created opportunities for peasants and marginalized urban youth to achieve social mobility. However, it also shapes a new regime of value that privileges the individualized e-commerce entrepreneur as an ideal subject, and fetishizes and instrumentalizes innovation and creativity in conformity with the global intellectual property regime. These tendencies not only contradict the reality of collective labor organization both on e-commerce platforms and in villages, but also conflict with the indispensable role of manual labor in the production process—reinforcing rather than overcoming existing inequalities and stratification in rural China.

Both the physical and transition-related impacts of climate change pose substantial macroeconomic risks. Yet, markets still lack credible estimates of how climate change will affect debt sustainability, sovereign creditworthiness and the public finances of major economies. We present a taxonomy for tracing the physical and transition impacts of climate change through to impacts on sovereign risk. We then apply the taxonomy to the UK’s potential transition to net zero. Meeting internationally agreed climate targets will require an unprecedented structural transformation of the global economy over the next two or three decades. The changing landscape of risks warrants new risk management and hedging strategies to contain climate risk and minimise the impact of asset stranding and asset devaluation. Yet, conditional on action being taken early, the opportunities from managing a net zero transition would substantially outweigh the costs.

The present article describes the main insights deriving from the papers collected in this special issue which jointly provide a ‘room with a view’ on some of the most relevant issues in climate policy such as: the role of uncertainty, the distributional implications of climate change, the drivers and applications of decarbonizing innovation, the role of emissions trading and its interactions with companion policies. While looking at different issues and from different angles, all papers share a similar attention to policy aspects and implications, especially in developing countries. This is particularly important to evaluate whether and to what extent the climate policies adopted thus far in developed countries can be replicated in emerging economies.

The relative importance of key state-level outcomes upon U.S. national corn and soybean production was examined using correlated component regression, a recently developed regression technique for application to multicollinear and sparse data sets. Standardized coefficients were used to rank the states’ relative importance. A Herfindahl-Hirschman Index was used to measure the degree of concentration among the top ranked states. The empirical analysis looked at two time periods: a pre-Genetic Modification (1975–1995) and a post-Genetic Modification (1996–2017) period. The results indicate that U.S. corn production is becoming less geographically concentrated in terms of state-level importance while the opposite holds true for soybean production.

Finding the ways that work to deliver the innovation needed should be given parity of esteem with getting the prices right as a focus of the economics profession and policy systems. Learn from experience as regards carbon pricing and carbon-reducing innovation; insights from the latter coming mainly from the US, China and Europe; demographically relatively small countries – Denmark (wind) and Australia (solar PV) – can make outsize contributions. A carbon price ceiling is too low to drive innovation; generating carbon-reducing innovation requires that it be explicitly recognized as a priority, and nurtured accordingly: identify the priority area(s) where innovation at scale will be necessary to make progress; baseline the elements of the innovation ecosystem which are already in place, and the gaps that need to be filled. Key elements include institutions and incentives that promote innovation, a research and enterprise community that make it happen, and a supportive public.

Innovation is an important part of energy policy, and encouraging clean energy innovation is often an explicit goal of policy makers. For local governments, promoting clean energy innovation is seen not only as a pathway to a cleaner economy but also as a tool for promoting the local economy. But is such optimism warranted? There is a substantial literature examining the relationships between innovation and environmental policy, but few studies focus explicitly on innovation at the state and local level. In this paper, I provide key lessons from research on clean energy innovation, focusing on lessons relevant for state and local governments. I then summarize the results of a recent working paper by Fu et al. (2018) that studied wind energy innovation across individual states in the United States. While state-level policies can promote clean energy innovation, it is overall market size that matters most. Thus, innovation need not occur in those states most actively promoting clean energy. I conclude with lessons for state and local governments drawn from both this work and the broader literature on energy innovation.

In this article, we present a model of the electricity sector where generation technologies are intermittent. The economic value of an electricity generation technology is given by integrating its production profile with the market price of electricity. We use estimates of the consumer's intertemporal elasticity of substitution for electricity consumption while parameterizing the model empirically to numerically calculate the elasticity between renewables and fossil energy. We find that there is a non-constant elasticity of substitution between renewable and fossil energy that depends on prices and intermittency. This suggests that the efficacy and welfare effects of carbon taxes and renewable subsidies vary geographically. Subsidizing research into battery technology and tailoring policy for local energy markets can mitigate these distributional side effects while complementing traditional policies used to promote renewable energy.

There is evidence that the risk of stranded assets in the oil and gas sector is underpriced in financial markets. Publicly traded Western oil and gas companies are starting to write down assets, opening up the possibility that more rationalisation of value is likely to come. To the extent that large oil companies diversify portfolios to include cleaner energy and carbon sequestration technologies, it could reduce the risk of a sudden cascading change in the stock valuation of these firms and related bond and credit markets. Instead, the vast majority of oil and gas assets that will be stranded are in the control of sovereign states whose national budgets are highly dependent on oil and gas revenues. Thus, the problem of stranded asset risk for the oil and gas sector may be most relevant in markets for sovereign credit as well as risks that go beyond financial losses.

This study uses an econometric approach to investigate the role of IPR protection on renewable energy adoption using panel data of 102 countries at five-year intervals over the period 1990–2005. The Ginarte-Park index is used as a measure of the strength of intellectual property protection while the adoption of renewable energy is measured by the share of renewable energy in total final energy use. The results reveal that the level of intellectual property rights protection and reform of the intellectual property rights regime do not have significant impact on renewable energy adoption, suggesting that IPR protection is not a cause for concern in the global quest for clean energy transition. On the contrary, we find that trade openness has a stronger influence in the transition to clean energy. Based on the findings of the study, we conclude that IPR protection does not influence renewable energy adoption except in high R&D countries; rather policy makers should concentrate efforts on economic factors, such as trade openness, that drive the adoption of renewable energy technologies.

Using cover crops can be beneficial not only for soil health but also for the environment. However, relatively few farmers have adopted cover crops, so understanding the barriers to adoption is necessary. We used a probit model with data on 1,712 soybean producers from the 2012 USDA Agricultural Resource Management Survey to identify factors affecting adoption of cover crops. We found that more precipitation was positively correlated with adoption, as was more hired labor. Adoption was also positively correlated with crop diversification and no-till adoption, which may relate to equipment availability.

This paper compares the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ex ante compliance cost estimates for the 2004 Automobile and Light-Duty Truck Surface Coating National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants to ex post evidence on the actual costs of compliance based on ex post cost data gathered from a subset of the industry via pilot survey and follow-up interviews. Unlike many prior retrospective studies on the cost of regulatory compliance, we use this newly gathered information to identify the key drivers of any differences between the ex ante and ex post estimates. We find that the U.S. EPA overestimated the cost of compliance for the plants in our sample and that overestimation was driven primarily by differences in the method of compliance rather than differences in the per-unit cost associated with a given compliance approach. In particular, the U.S. EPA expected facilities to install pollution abatement control technologies in their paint shops to reduce emissions of hazardous air pollutants, but instead these plants complied by reformulating coatings.

This study examines the rapidly expanding biofuels industry and identifies challenges for producer-owned biofuel projects. The U.S. ethanol industry has been growing rapidly, and biodiesel production is poised for similar growth. Producer involvement is driven by the desire to add value to farm commodities and the impact of biofuel projects on local grain prices. Local state and federal incentives have also stimulated producer interest. The long-run profitability of biofuel projects is driven by feedstock availability, access to market centers for biofuels, access to markets for coproducts, and utility costs and availability. The rapidly increasing size and scale of ethanol and biodiesel plants make it difficult for producers to fund these projects. Additionally, the development and adoption of new non-grain biofuel technologies may negate some comparative advantages of producers, such as feedstock cost and availability. The geographic expansion of biofuel projects into grain deficit regions will also create additional challenges.

Despite its importance in benefit-cost analyses in the water supply, transportation, and health care sectors, there are relatively few empirical estimates of the value of travel time savings (VTT) in low-income countries, particularly in rural areas. Analysts instead often rely on a textbook “rule of thumb” of valuing time at 50% of prevailing unskilled wage rates, though these benchmarks have little empirical support in these settings. We estimate the value of travel time through the use of a repeated discrete choice stated preference exercise. We asked 325 rural households in Meru County, Kenya to rank two new hypothetical water sources against their current water source. The two new hypothetical sources were described as safe and reliable to use, but varied only in their distance from the household and the price charged per water container. Results from random-parameters logit models imply an average value of travel time of 18 Ksh/hr, and generally support the 50% rule. These models produce the first individual-level VTT estimates reported in a low-income setting, and indicate statistically-significant heterogeneity in VTTs, though the heterogeneity is not well correlated with observables. A latent-class approach identifies four classes of respondents: one class (about one third of respondents) values time very highly (49 Ksh/hr), one poorer group values time hardly at all (less than 1 Ksh/hr), and two groups value time at approximately 9 Ksh/hr.

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are point sources of pollution and require Clean Water Act permits. The 2003 regulations allow Large CAFOs to propose alternative performance standards (APS) that offer equivalent or better environmental performance than the baseline technology. Principal obstacles to APS success include the complexities of demonstrating superior performance, cost uncertainties for obtaining approval, CAFO risks of participation, inter- and intra-organizational barriers of permitting agencies, and potential lawsuits brought by environmental groups. Despite obstacles, APS offers potential for technology innovations and reduced environmental compliance costs.

This paper discusses the three invited papers presented in the session titled “New Regulations Require New Solutions: Federal Provisions Governing Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” (i.e., CAFOs). These papers provide an excellent review of current state and federal laws and an excellent summary of what has been and is currently being done with respect to CAFO regulation. The papers present three different policy approaches: i) alternative performance standards, ii) location-specific regulation, and iii) insurance-based underwriting of CAFO discharges. Each approach has its drawbacks; however, blending these suggested policies into current regulation would result in efficiency gains.

The inclusion of cover crops in cropping systems brings direct and indirect costs and benefits. Farmers will adopt and utilize cover crops as long as the perceived benefit of using them is positive. This paper examines the demographic and management factors affecting the adoption and perceived benefit (in terms of improved crop yield) of using winter annual cover crops. A double selectivity model of cover crop adoption and perceived yield gain was estimated using survey data of Alabama farmers examining cover crop use and management. Results may help in understanding factors shaping farmers' perceptions, adoption, and retention of cover crops.