This review traces the evolution of India's agricultural policy regime, centered on price supports, input subsidies, and complex trade policies that oscillate between protectionism and implicit taxation of farmers. It highlights three interlinked challenges: low farm incomes, poor diet quality, and environmental degradation. The policy architecture that ensures food security constrains the pace of agricultural transformation. Reform requires repurposing subsidies and restoring credibility to trade policy. While the digital infrastructure is in place to begin the shift to smarter subsidies, the political path is risky, as policy must seek credible ways to signal protection of farmer interests. Despite these policy rigidities, economic growth and urbanization continue to drive structural changes in agriculture. Diversification away from cereals, new food value chains, and rising integration with nonfarm employment are the key dynamic forces shaping agricultural outcomes. Future outcomes will depend on policy responses to emerging food value chains and new agricultural technologies.
Flooding is one of the costliest natural disasters in the United States, and a major source of flood damage is to the residential housing stock. Given the value of housing, both as a major source of household wealth and to the residential mortgage market, a long-standing literature has examined how floods impact house prices and evaluated the protective role of flood insurance. In this review, we synthesize the literature examining the impact of flood risk and flood events on housing value. We also examine research themes in the US flood insurance market including the determinants of flood insurance demand, the impact of insurance on household decisions to manage flood risk, and emerging changes to watch in the public and private flood insurance markets. We then survey key data challenges and opportunities and conclude by examining who bears the flood risk in the US housing market. As climate change is expected to change future precipitation patterns and raise sea levels, flood risk and insurance will likely be even more important for housing markets in the future.
This review reassesses the economics of commodity price stabilization policies through the lens of the rational expectations storage model. In frictionless markets, private speculative storage efficiently smooths commodity prices; thus, welfare gains from public intervention require the presence of market or endowment failures, which are prevalent in agricultural markets in low-income settings. Optimal state–contingent stabilization policies raise welfare but are complex, crowd out private storage, and are difficult to design and implement. Simple rules—notably narrow price bands or storage-cost subsidies—offer more feasible approximations, with subsidies being more efficient. In open economies with high trade costs, storage can mitigate price troughs. Conversely, export controls can mitigate domestic transmission of global price spikes but are non-cooperative. Although storage policies stabilize prices, their welfare effects are nuanced. They entail large redistributive transfers that far exceed efficiency gains; accordingly, they should be viewed as second-best instruments, valuable when better-targeted alternatives are unavailable.
Twenty years after its launch, the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) stands as the world's largest and most mature carbon market. The ETS has developed, from generous allowance allocation and initial price collapse to the introduction of the Market Stability Reserve, enabling more effective emissions reductions. Drawing on major reviews and recent empirical studies shows that the system decreased emissions, limited carbon leakage, and facilitated low-carbon innovation, especially in the power sector. The system evolved from a pure cap-and-trade to a hybrid instrument that adjusted the allowance supply to stabilize prices and functions within a broader policy ecosystem, which influences its effectiveness. However, the EU ETS still faces challenges: decarbonizing heavy industry, considering transport and building, phasing out free allocation, managing social impacts, and more. The EU ETS can teach us to design politically feasible carbon pricing systems that are durable.
This article summarizes methods, prospects, and methodological questions for water quality benefit transfer. Benefit transfer is the use of welfare estimates from settings where original valuation research has been conducted to predict similar estimates for other settings, allowing quantification of benefits and costs when original valuation studies are infeasible. Water quality has been among the most researched areas of benefit transfer, in part due to requirements for benefit-cost analysis within policies and programs that affect surface and ground water. The article begins with a review of benefit transfer methods and characteristics of water quality that challenge transfer validity. We then explore alternative approaches for meta-regression modeling and value prediction to support these transfers, focusing on emerging methods that may afford greater flexibility than traditional parametric approaches and enable gains in transfer accuracy, while maintaining desirable theoretical properties. The article concludes with a discussion of unresolved questions and research needs.
