James Vercammen (AJAE Editor)
In this virtual issue of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, we highlight recent research on agri-environmental issues. Barely discussed in the literature twenty years ago, articles that focus on agri-environmental issues are now prominent in the agricultural economics research agenda.
A particularly important theme featured in this collection is the valuation of environmental amenities, including recreation, native vegetation, and, more generally, ecosystem services. A second dominant theme is water, including consumers' response to a bottled water tax, allocative efficiency with privatized water rights versus irrigation districts, and water availability as a determinant of agricultural land values. Another interesting topic that is featured in this collection due to rapidly growing public concern is invasive species and disease resistance.
The collection concludes with two papers on environmental regulation, one involving the costs of regulation for a typical U.S. dairy farm, and the second involving the impact of changing wolf pack locations on beef production. Issues involving climate change were intentionally not included in this collection because this broad and important topic is deserving of its own special issue.
Overall, the ten papers in this collection nicely reveal how innovative methods of theoretical modeling, survey design, and econometric modeling are used to analyze various types of environmentally-related market failures and to justify creative policy proposals.
Go here: https://academic.oup.com/ajae/pages/environmental_economics_vi
