Suchergebnisse

African swine fever (ASF), a highly contagious disease affecting domestic and wild pigs, has been spreading globally, with devastating impacts on hog markets. The European Union saw pork exports decrease by €556 million (9%) as a result of ASF outbreaks across four countries in 2014. Similarly, in 2018, when ASF was first reported in China, there was a 30% decrease in the Chinese pig inventory and in total pork production. ASF's eventual spread to North America seems inevitable. Given Canada's export-oriented pork industry, the economic costs and animal welfare impacts of an ASF outbreak in the Canadian hog sector could prove devastating as a result of potential border closures and large-scale animal depopulation. To estimate the impacts, we build a partial equilibrium, vertically integrated model of Ontario's pork industry from the breeding herd through to end consumer. If an outbreak occurred in a central production region of Ontario, we estimate that Ontario's pork industry would experience a welfare loss of C$860 million (28.1%). Conversely, if an outbreak occurred in Western Canada, the Ontario pork industry would benefit by C$198 million (6.5%). Not surprisingly, an outbreak will redistribute significant economic rents in the sector depending on where exactly the first outbreak occurs.

AbstractThis paper investigates the effect of environmental crimes on ambient air pollution in Italy, using annual provincial data over the period 2010–2016. While the impact of ambient air pollution on health has been the focus of a significant amount of literature, a nascent body of works is focusing on the impact of illegal behavior on environmental quality. Our work is ideally divided in two steps: firstly, we identify and assess empirically the potential correlation between environmental crimes and four different kinds of ambient air pollution. Secondly, we identify the health impacts that may be triggered by environmentally harmful illegal activities, through their impact on ambient air pollution, by linking them to existing contributions. Our findings suggest that the existence of such an "indirect" link may indeed be confirmed. We find that higher levels of PM2.5, PM10, and O3 concentration are associated with higher levels of environmental crimes related to forest fires and landscape violations (except for PM10 in the latter case), while NO2 concentration is not significantly associated with any environmental crime. On the other hand, we also find non-linearities in the estimated correlations. We conclude our analysis by providing a straightforward quantification of health-related impacts of ambient air pollution changes potentially triggered by criminal environmental behaviors. We hope that our findings could contribute to a more accurate evaluation of environmental crime impacts and, subsequently, inform future criminal environmental enforcement and environmental policies.

Rising urban and environmental demand for water has created growing pressure to re-allocate water from traditional agricultural uses. The evolution of water markets has been more complicated than those for other resources. In this paper, we first explain these differences by examining water rights and regulatory issues. Second, we place our research in the context of the economics literature on water marketing. Third, we present new, comprehensive data on prices and the extent, nature, and timing of water transfers across 12 western states from 1987-2005. We find that prices are higher for agriculture-to-urban trades versus within-agriculture trades, in part, reflecting the differences in marginal values between the two uses. Prices for urban use are also growing relative to agricultural use. Markets are responding in that the number of agriculture-to-urban transactions is rising, whereas the number of agriculture-to-agriculture transfers is not. Further, there is a shift from using short-term leases to using multi-year leases of water and permanent sales of water rights. This pattern underscores the need to consider the amounts of water obligated over time, rather than examining only annual flows in assessing the quantities of water traded as is the common practice in the literature. Considering water obligated over time, termed committed water, we find significantly more is transferred and the direction of trading is different than if the focus is on annual flows. Finally, the data reveal considerable variation in water trading across the states.