Jeong J. Rhee, John A. Miranowski, Determination of Income, Production, and Employment Under Pollution Control: An Input-Output Approach, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 146-150

Agricultural policy has traditionally been concerned with the maintenance and stability of farm income, and the provision of a stable food supply at low relative prices. The Food Security Act of 1985 was the first farm legislation to directly tie farm income and environmental concerns through the Conservation Reserve Program, conservation compliance, sodbuster, and swampbuster provisions. The coordination of conservation and farm income policies contributed to commodity supply control by reducing the availability of arable land, and it promoted environmental quality by removing some highly erodible land and wetlands from crop production. A number of new environmental and food safety initiatives are also being enacted outside the agricultural policy process. The most significant piece of legislation is the Water Quality Act of 1987, designed to control

This paper develops an empirical strategy for testing competing hypotheses of expectation regimes when direct measures of expectations are unavailable. The procedure takes as given an assumed structural relationship between expected values of exogenous variables and a given decision variable. By imposing different expectation regimes on this model, we obtain an artificial nesting of the hypothesized regimes which allows us to test whether any specification dominates. This methodology is extended to multiple equation applications with any number of hypothesized expectation regimes. The tests are illustrated using a model of the response of county-level farm acreage allocation to expected commodity prices.

EVER since the publication of Rachel Carson's famous book, Silent Spring (1962), insecticide pollution has been an important public issue. As well as naturalists and medical researchers, economists have joined the discussion. They have rightly claimed that insecticide usage is an economic phenomenon, and they have proceeded to estimate the costs and production losses from total or partial bans.' In this paper, we consider the possibility of reducing United States insecticide usage through an efficient relocation of agricultural activities. We find that if agricultural activities were located so as to minimize the production and transportation costs to satisfy the demand for agricultural products, there would be a substantial reduction in insecticide requirements. Our argument is organized as follows. In section II, we describe United States insecticide usage, emphasizing regional differences. Section III is a discussion of studies of efficient crop relocation, i.e., studies concerned with the location of crops under cost minimizing conditions and without the influence of government price support and land retirement schemes. In section IV, we estimate the insecticide requirements for an efficient agricultural sector. The estimates are repeated in section V with alternative measures of insecticide usage, and our conclusions are summarized in section VI.