Three Essays In Environmental And Agricultural Economics

Three Essays In Environmental And Agricultural Economics
Author: Biswo Nath Poudel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN:

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This dissertation probes three issues of current interest in environmental and agricultural economics. The first paper provides an in-depth analysis of sedimentation management issue in large reservoirs. The paper provides a new model of sedimentation management and conditional on assumed primitives of the model, analyses different scenarios under which sedimentation removal may increase or decrease. The paper also provides insights on how temperature fluctuation, increased sedimentation arrival in the reservoir and change in the perception of large reservoirs among the public may affect the sustainability and management of the large reservoir. The second paper looks at the data from the Latin American countries to search for the presence of Environmental Kuznets Curve(EKC) in Latin America. The paper is also one of the earliest papers to use forestry data and semiparametric approach in finding EKC. The paper finds no evidence of EKC in Latin America as a whole, and in general finds that EKC is sensitive to the region of choice. The third paper carries out an an empirical investigation to test for the convergence of total factor productivity(TFP) of agricultural sector in the United States. The investigation does not find any evidence of convergence while looking at the U.S. state-level agricultural TFP at the aggregate level. However, it finds support for convergence within some of the clusters or within some of the regions. The paper takes a new approach in grouping states, which makes it different from other papers where ad hoc grouping of states was done. In this paper, such approach is abandoned in favor of a cluster analysis approach that relies on data to form "clusters". Cluster analysis approach finds that convergence in the regional level (cluster) does not improve significantly compared to the findings by a wellknown previously published study which didn't use cluster analysis approach.

Three Essays on Environmental and Agricultural Economics

Three Essays on Environmental and Agricultural Economics
Author: Jayash Paudel
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:

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The dissertation gathers empirical evidence from several data sources in the United States and Nepal to provide a better understanding of the linkage between agriculture and the environment. The first essay examines the impact of fertilizer use on water quality using over 2.9 million pollution readings on nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in water sites across the U.S. Findings show that a 10% increase in the use of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers leads to a 1.47% increase in the concentration of nitrogen and a 1.68% increase in the concentration of phosphorus, respectively. Results also indicate that there exists heterogeneity in nutrient pollution elasticity estimates across 18 water resource regions. The second essay presents empirical evidence that farmers adjust fertilizer application in response to variation in temperature and precipitation trends during the growing season in the corn belt of the United States. Estimates indicate that farmers increase nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer use by 0.172% and 0.238% in response to moderate heat. However, farmers decrease nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer application by 0.260% and 0.323% in response to temperature exceeding a threshold that leads to damaging effects on crop production. I further find that farmers will apply 37.41% more nitrogen fertilizers by mid-century when compared to a world without climate change, leading to deterioration of water quality. I show that the resulting nutrient runoff will increase nitrogen and phosphorus pollution by 9.72% and 12.91% under a business-as-usual scenario. The final essay studies the impact of a fertilizer subsidy program in the Hills region of Nepal that aims to enhance agricultural yields of smallholder farmers. Using data from household surveys conducted before and after the program, I apply difference-in-differences estimation to show that the subsidy, on average, leads to a 38.7% increase in fertilizer use among eligible households. However, compared to farmers with larger plot sizes, smallholder farmers experience a 12.1% decrease in the use of chemical fertilizers and a 21.2% decrease in agricultural yield after the subsidy program. I discuss how fertilizer supply shortages and varying access to the subsidy contribute to the negative impact of the subsidy program among smallholder farmers.

Three Essays on Agricultural Development and Environmental Economics in China

Three Essays on Agricultural Development and Environmental Economics in China
Author: Wangyang Lai
Publisher:
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2017
Genre: Agriculture
ISBN:

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In the first chapter, I investigate the effect of land fragmentation on machinery use as well as the effect of machinery use on crop production. The data come from a farm survey in Hebei and Shandong provinces in 2008. Endogeneity is addressed by utilizing land fragmentation due to previous long-term land assignment as an instrument and first difference estimation between normalized wheat and corn output from the same plots in the same year. The main results indicate that consolidating an average farm of 0.31 hectares from 2.28 plots to one plot increases machinery use by about 10%. Further, a 10% increase of machinery use increases crop production between 0.5% and 1%.