Contenu du sommaire : Agriculture et environnement

A Measurement of the Effect of Public Support on Community Agricultural Production, by Jean-Christophe Bureau. Aggregate indicators of actual support are constructed to measure the effect of public support on production. The commonly used effective protection rates are adjusted to include all government intervention affecting producer supply. The support rates are constructed as superlative index numbers. Econometrics is used to estimate the price aggregator functions. A normalized quadratic functional form is specified for the price aggregator functions and estimated in a two-stage optimization framework. The effect of public intervention on the agricultural sector is measured for ten European countries from 1973 to 1989. The superlative rates of actual support are compared with Laspeyres indices, which do not allow for substitutions between commodities. The results suggest that the aggregate measures of support normally used in international negotiations are subject to not-inconsiderable biases.

The New Common Agricultural Policy Arrangements,0 by Hervé Guyomard and Louis-Pascal Mahé. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the effects of the new CAP arrangements - lower support prices, compensatory payments and set-aside - on output supply, variable-factor derived demand, intensification and quasi-fixed factor (land and labour) rewards. We show that yields and farming intensity are likely to decrease due to substantial cuts in support prices, but that set-aside may counterbalance a large part of this effect. It is also shown that the compensatory payments introduced by the reform are poorly designed, as they influence surface area allocation. Lastly, the political scope of the analysis lends itself to the proposal of improvements to the reform to strengthen the consistency between agriculture's traditional roles (food production and trade) and its "new" functions (nature conservation).

The European Grain Export Policy and Operator Behaviour: An Econometric Analysis of Refund Tenders, by Jean-Marc Bourgeon and Yves Le Roux. European grain export refunds are largely attributed by tendering procedures. The auction theory is used to model the behaviour of operators who take part in weekly tenders for soft wheat intervention stocks. The agents'optimal supply strategies are specified and estimated using two different hypotheses as to the evaluation of the grains by the operators. Each of these hypotheses corresponds to a particular mode of operation on the world grain and related markets. The structural approach adopted produces the conclusion that agent behaviour is dictated by a single reference on the world market and that the procedure for allocating export subsidies is efficient.

Putting the Nature and Efficiency of Voluntary Agreements in Environmental Policy into Perspective, by Matthieu Glachant. This article puts forward an analysis of the factors underlying the specific nature of voluntary agreements in the form of negotiations between government and companies. Adissymmetry is revealed by the analytic differentiation between the social goal of eliminating pollution, i.e. the total amount of pollution that the agreement aims to expel, and the means used to achieve this objective. The consideration of goals cannot lead to an agreement when the government is unable to express a credible threat. However, the consideration of means gives rise to decentralized negotiations between firms, which are advantageous from the point of view of allocative efficiency. These results are discussed using examples of existing agreements.

A Microeconomic Analysis of an Agricultural Production Rights Market: Application to Milk Quotas in France, by Xavier Delache, Catherine Goudounèche, Hervé Guyomard, Xavier Irz and Louis-Pascal Mahé. This article uses the duality theory framework and the virtual or shadow price concept of a rationed good to analyze producer behaviour under output quotas when quota rights can be leased or rented. We develop a microeconomic model of producer behaviour in a marketable quota system and use it to define the (renting) quota market: quota price, traded licences and income effects. The theoretical framework is applied to a sample of French dairy farms for 1991.

Payment for Environmental Services Rendered by Agriculture, by Virginie Madelin. The Common Agricultural Policy reform of May 1 992 formally acknowledged the role of agriculture in environmental management. Agriculture's positive effects on the environment are not normally rewarded by the market at their fair social value and therefore do not reach a social optimum. A specific type of instrument fits each of the market regulation, social equity and environmental protection goals. Fair payment for environmental services presupposes measuring their social value, which is necessarily evaluated by indirect methods. Payment should be made directly by the users or by government aid combined with special compensation or compensation distinct from purely social goals.

The Contingent Evaluation Method Used to Assess the Quality of Coastal Waters, by François Bonnieux, Philippe Le Goffe and Dominique Vermesch. This article reviews the historical context surrounding the development of the contingent evaluation method by highlighting the driving force of central government demand and action taken against those responsible for environmental damage. The use of the method is discussed initially from a general standpoint, based on the hypothetical scenario notion with its consequent biases and on preference disclosing techniques. The method is then illustrated by a case study of coastal water quality improvement. This study uses the example of Brest harbour and the results of a summer 1993 survey of 607 people. Two scenarios are considered. The first concerns improving the purity of the water and the second the protection of the harbour's ecosystem against eutrophication. Of those surveyed, 75% said that they would be prepared to pay for purity and 49% for the ecosystem. A Tobit model of agreement to pay is drawn up for each item. The most significant explanatory variables are gender, income, educational level or profession, environmental awareness, the perception of water quality and the practice of leisure activities.

Cereal Yield Trends in a Situation of Allocative Efficiency, by Dominique Vermesch. The May 1992 CAP reform makes a top priority of the regulation of the supply of grains. It is therefore essential to understand the short- and medium-run cereal yield trends that could result from the reforms. This paper uses a parametric model assuming efficiency of allocations to estimate the yields. Although the reform prompts low yields for the various cases considered, other elements such as set-aside, the quasi-fixed nature of certain inputs and decreasing returns to scale should create contrary effects.

Technical Efficiency and Potential Productivity Gains of French Grain Farms, by Isabelle Piot, Jean-Philippe Boussemart, Benoît Dervaux and Dominique Vermersch. This study examines the hypothesis that the level of microeconomic efficiency influences the extent to which agricultural market regulation policies are efficient. The case study used is the May 1992 CAP reform, which provides for curbing the rise in grain output. We use a non-parametric approach in an intertemporal framework to estimate technical inefficiencies and inefficiencies of scale for a sample of grain farms. The measured inefficiencies are interpreted as potential productivity gains, given here in the form of the increase in cereal yields per hectare. The total absorption of pure technical inefficiency should therefore result in a 10% to 12% increase in cereal yields.

The CAP Reform and the Gatt Agreements: Effects on Financial Transfers Between the Twelve, by Eve Fouilleux. The Common Agricultural Policy reform and the Gatt agricultural agreements have altered the way the financial advantages of belonging to the common agricultural market are distributed among the Twelve. The Directorate for Forecasting's Erpac model is used to evaluate this distribution by studying the CAP's redistributive effects before the reform and analyzing their potential development based on simulations up to 1996 (post reform) and 1999 (on the hypothesis that the new CAP will be brought into Une with the Gatt requirements). In spite of extensive changes to the type of transfers from which it benefits, France emerges as one of the countries that gains the most from these revisions.

Non-Price Competitiveness in French Trade in Agricultural and Food Products on the Community Market, by Emmanuelle Chevassus-Lozza and Jacques Gallezot. This study of the determinants for French exports of agricultural and food products within the Community market concludes that competitiveness cannot be limited solely to price concerns. Deterioration in the relative price ratio does not necessarily lead to a loss of market share. "Structural", "volume" or more generally "non-price" competitiveness comes into play in particular for food product quality and differentiation. Prices and non-prices would appear to be two complementary and non-interchangeable aspects of external competition wherein the non-price determinants are structural components influencing the price.

The Community Strategy to Curb the Greenhouse Effect: The Implications for France, by Olivier Beaumais and Thierry Bréchet. The Community proposal to introduce a tax on carbon and energy is one of the key projects in the efforts to set up a policy to prevent global warming. The high level of the proposed tax (approximately 1.5% of GDP) and the asserted principle of tax neutrality (which posits that existing taxes should be reduced when this new tax is introduced) have prompted us to evaluate the macroeconomic impact of such a strategy using the system of Hermès-Midas models. Several tax redeployment scenarios showing the French economy's room for manoeuvre in such a context are thus studied. In addition to the choice between labour taxes and energy taxes, we consider the potential contribution of energy-saving investments to the attainment of the Community aim of stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions.

The Canadian Milk Quota Market: An Original Experiment, by Catherine Goudounèche. In 1970, Canada adopted quotas for manufacturing milk. Since then, each province has tried out different systems for the trading of these quotas between producers. These successive trials have resulted in the setting up of a single centralized market, which operates for quotas unconnected with the farm's assets and enjoys market conditions approaching perfect competition. This development has been accompanied by a rise in the price of quotas and the free market for quotas has acted as a restructuring tool for the Canadian milk sector by speeding up the concentration of holdings. An additional regulation has protected the production of certain fragile areas.

Magali: A French Agricultural Supply Model, by Marie-Annick Mathieu and José Romanantsoa. Magali (an agricultural model analyzing intrasectorial liaisons) is a dynamic macroeconometric model of French agriculture. Its purpose is to describe the sector's medium-run development, as presented in the national accounts, and especially the supply of agricultural products and formation of value-added and agricultural income. It also represents how the sector develops structurally through investments, land and the number of holdings. It thereby establishes quantified relations between the main French agricultural indicators: output prices, input prices, surface areas, yields, livestock populations, production, intra-consumption, income, productivity and structure. Magali is essentially a supply model, although it is extended to partial equilibria for certain products. This article presents the links between the different parts of the model, the specifications and the estimates of the main equations that make it up.