Ecosystem management may extend multiple use management, where economists identify and value a complex mix of ecosystem outputs. The dominant theme in conservation biology favors “safe minimum standard” (SMS) constraints on ecosystem attributes, which respond to complex and purely uncertain ecological knowledge and lead economists toward valuation questions that identify “tolerable” constraints. A hierarchical SMS constraint raises substitution possibilities among ecosystem-level components. Economists may identify unavoidable resource tradeoffs, such as in allocating land among elements of a reserve network, particularly when ecological wealth differs among geographically dispersed human communities. Economic and ecological ironies obfuscate intuitive contributions to ecosystem management policy.

By broadening the definition of an ecosystem to include economic activities, can we better characterize the interactions and relationships among agricultural activities and important indicators of ecological system health? This paper addresses research approaches for assessing the role of agriculture in an ecosystems context. Environmental regulation and resource management policies have heightened the interest in understanding interactions among agricultural activities and the natural resource base, including the impacts of agriculture on environmental quality and the impacts on agriculture of ecosystem restoration efforts. What are the most meaningful indicators of environmental quality? Which agricultural practices and policies should be considered, along with which nonagricultural resource uses? Finally, does the evolving thinking about ecosystems permit us to link agricultural practices and policies more directly and meaningfully to conceptions of sustainability, of both natural and socioeconomic systems? This paper presents a brief synopsis of ecosystem management, drawing from several recent governmental initiatives. It then provides an overview of the economics of ecosystem management from the perspective of the role of agriculture; discusses two specific cases, the Pacific Northwest and South Florida; and concludes with a discussion of promising economic approaches, data needs, and caveats to those engaged in policy analysis involving ecosystem restoration.

The transitional period in the development of a new field is often characterized by competing articulations, recourse to philosophy, and a debate over fundamentals (Kuhn 1970). As exemplified by numerous articles and books providing alternative definitions in the recent academic and policy literature, it is clear that the emerging field of ecosystem management is still struggling to identify a shared paradigm. Thus it is not a surprise that, in surveying the ecosystem management literature, Swallow (1996, p. 83) finds this field to be “one of the vaguest ideas or mandates of the decade.” A critical concern is that this debate over definitions may not be resolved in the foreseeable future, inhibiting policy-relevant research progress in this important area.

The National Research Council report entitled Colleges of Agriculture at the Land Grant Universities: Public Service and Public Policy was released in spring 1996. Several of the study recommendations may be particularly pertinent and interesting to the land grant colleges of the Northeast. This article reviews the study background, process, and general conclusions. It highlights several specific recommendations of potential interest in the Northeast, including those relating to federal support through formula funds and competitive grants, regionalization of programs, and integrating and balancing teaching, research, and extension.

The 1996 Farm Bill marks a new direction for the government in agriculture. By decoupling payments from price levels for crops, it undermines long-run political support for programs. Dairy price supports will end in 2000, and nutrition programs will be on a separate reauthorization schedule from farm programs. Together, these actions should weaken the farm bill coalition, making the remaining programs much more difficult to reauthorize than in earlier years. The 1996 Farm Bill may be the last farm bill of its kind and the beginning of the end to active government involvement in agricultural markets.

In this paper we estimate the demand for rock climbing and calculate welfare measures for changing access to a number of climbs at a climbing area. In addition to the novel recreation application, we extend the travel cost methodology by combining the double hurdle count data model (DH) with a multinomial logit model of site-choice. The combined model allows us simultaneously to explain the decision to participate and to allocate trips among sites. The application is to climbers who visit one of the premiere rock-climbing areas in the northeastern United States and its important substitute sites. We also estimate a conventional welfare measure, which is the maximum WTP to avoid loss of access to the climbing site.

The presence of allocatable fixed inputs may cause truly joint technologies to appear nonjoint in the short run as well as truly nonjoint technologies to appear joint. This paper demonstrates theoretically why this can happen and then documents that it actually occurs in a significant way in aggregate U.S. agricultural production. A simple testing procedure is used that requires no data on input allocations. The important finding is that failure to reject true (apparent) nonjointness does not justify modeling short-run (long-run) supply independent of alternative output prices.

This paper develops a methodology to calculate the impact of integrated pest management (IPM) on pesticide use, yields, and farm profits. The methodology is applied to the IPM adoption among fresh market tomato producers in eight states. The method is of general applicability. It accounts for self-selectivity and simultaneity, and the pesticide demand and yield equations are theoretically consistent with a profit function. The results support the notion that fresh market tomato growers who adopt IPM for insects and diseases apply significantly less insecticides and fungicides, respectively, than do those who do not adopt IPM; IPM adoption has an insignificant effect on yields and a small effect on profits.

A combined telephone contact-mail booklet-telephone interview of California and New England households regarding their willingness to pay for fire management in California and Oregon's old-growth forests was performed to test hypotheses regarding the spatial extent of the public goods market. Using a multiple-bounded contingent valuation question, the study found that New England households' annual willingness to pay for the California and Oregon programs was statistically different from zero. This analysis points out that households receive benefits from fire protection of old-growth forests in states other than their own. In this case study, limiting the survey sample to state residents where the National Forest is located would reflect about 20% of the national benefits. However, using resident values as a proxy for nonresidents would overstate the national benefits by 75%, since the values per household are significantly different. This finding suggests more emphasis in future surveys on selecting an institutionally and economically relevant sample frame rather than an expedient one.

A content analysis is conducted on the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review the official publication of the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association, to determine whether the journal has maintained a strong regional focus and whether there has been a narrow concentration of published articles in subject area and methodology. The results show that in the 1990s (1) the share of articles that do not focus on the Northeast has increased tremendously and (2) more articles used quantitative techniques than nonquantitative methods.

This study examines the effects of a wife's participation in the labor force and other socioeconomic factors on family expenditures for prepared food, food prepared at home, and food away from home using the Bureau of Labor Statistics 1992 consumer expenditure survey. On the one hand, results indicate that the number of children, home ownership with mortgage, seasonality, region, wife's age, and income are important determinants of expenditures on food prepared at home. A wife's education and participation in the labor force, on the other hand, affect expenditures on prepared food and food away from home. The impact of both these factors is greater on food away from home than on prepared food expenditures.

Trade theorists have demonstrated that different trade policy instruments have different effects on the quality and source of imports. Countervailing duties (CVDs), like specific tariffs, should induce quality upgrading. However, the magnitude and timing of the quality adjustments are influenced by the credibility of the duties that can be legally contested and modified after annual administrative reviews. Index numbers are used to assess the timing and magnitude of the product mix and country mix substitution effects in U.S. pork imports in response to the U.S. CVDs on Canadian exports of live hogs and fresh, chilled, and frozen pork.

Multiple-objective decision making (MODEM) provides an effective framework for integrated resource assessment of agroecosystems. Two elements of integrated assessment are discussed and illustrated: (1) adding noneconomic objectives as constraints in an optimization problem; and (2) evaluating tradeoffs among competing objectives using the efficiency frontier for objectives. These elements are illustrated for a crop farm and watershed in northern Missouri. An interactive, spatial decision support system (ISDSS) makes the MODEM framework accessible to unsophisticated users. A conceptual ISDSS is presented that assesses the socioeconomic, environmental, and ecological consequences of alternative management plans for reducing soil erosion and nonpoint source pollution in agroecosystems. A watershed decision support system based on the ISDSS is discussed.

Price expectations play a critical role in commodity markets where producers must make input decisions well before output is realized. This paper brings together alternative expectations regimes, their estimation, and hypothesis tests for use in structural commodity models to determine their use by commodity producers. Extrapolative mechanisms and rational expectations are considered under risk neutrality and risk aversion. The assumptions implicit in the use of aggregate data in these models are made explicit. Structural models using individual survey data are discussed. While Muth's rational expectations hypothesis has found widespread acceptance in the macroeconomic literature, empirical results from industry studies indicate that commodity producers may have heterogeneous price expectations, with no single expectations hypothesis dominating. This is not surprising given that different producers possess different information and have different costs associated with information collection and processing.

The United States and the European Union both employ export subsidies to stimulate wheat trade and to increase their competitiveness in world markets. The environmental consequences of these policies are being questioned. We stimulate reducing or removing export subsidies for wheat from the United States and the EU using a multicountry partial equilibrium model, and we analyze the impact of export subsidy policy reform on nitrogen fertilizer and other chemical use. Our findings indicate that the U.S. EEP program cannot be blamed for environmental degradation in terms of nitrate leaching, while EU wheat subsidies make only a small contribution to nitrate pollution.