Julian M. Alston

• University of California, Davis

Wine is the most differentiated of all farm products, with much of the differentiation based on the location of production. In this paper, we estimate the effects of climate and vintage weather on California's varietal wine quality and prices. Our analysis is based on a sample of premium wines rated by Wine Spectator magazine between 1994 and 2022...

This paper examines the economic impact of wine counterfeiting, with a focus on the Sassicaia scandal, publicized in 2020, regarding counterfeit 2015 vintage bottles of the iconic Super Tuscan wine. Wine fraud, documented since ancient Rome, has evolved alongside the industry, with key developments such as the Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée system...

R&D is slow magic. It takes many years before research investments begin to affect productivity, but then they can affect productivity for a long time. Many economists get this wrong. Here, we revisit the conceptual foundations for R&D lag models used to represent the temporal links between research investments and impact, review prevalent practice...

Given the increasing number of applications in agriculture of gene editing, specifically CRISPR, it is important to understand consumers' perceptions of this breeding technology. We estimate consumers’ willingness to pay for selected quality attributes of table grapes developed using either conventional breeding or CRISPR. Results show that the wil...

This study estimates consumers’ willingness to pay for specific product (quality) and process (agronomic) attributes of table grapes, including taste, texture, external appearance, and the expected number of chemical applications, and for the breeding technology used to develop the plant. Considering varietal traits, on average our survey responden...

The woke food movement, epitomized by the EAT-Lancet Commission, is a relatively recent phenomenon—more prevalent in high-income countries where food is comparatively abundant, and, within those countries, more associated with rich liberal elite groups than others. Perhaps this movement is doing some good, by generating interest and discussion abou...

The CGIAR is a unique and highly successful institutional arrangement for funding and conducting multilateral agricultural R&D. Established in 1971, the CGIAR has spent about $60 billion in present value terms mainly on R&D for staple food crops to support the world's poor. In this study, we provide a quantitative assessment of the past payoffs to...

Today’s European wine policy is centered on a system of appellations, implemented as geographical indications (GIs), that entail significant technological regulations—restricting the varieties that may be grown, while imposing maximum yields per hectare and other rules regarding grape production and winemaking practice. This paper outlines the hist...

Has the golden age of U.S. agricultural productivity growth ended? We analyze the detailed patterns of productivity growth spanning a century of profound changes in American agriculture. We document a substantial slowing of U.S. farm productivity growth, following a late mid-century surge—20 years after the surge and slowdown in U.S. industrial pro...

Throughout history and in every part of the world, innovation in agriculture has played crucial roles in economic development by increasing farm productivity, enhancing the incomes of poor farmers and making food ever-more abundant and cheaper for consumers, while reducing the demands placed on natural resource stocks. Nevertheless, governments and...

The yeast, Brettanomyces bruxellensis (Brett) is a significant cause of quality defects associated with red wine spoilage. At least some wine producers spend significant resources to prevent, detect, and mitigate damage from Brett, and many express concern about it, but some producers and consumers say they like it in small doses. Brett damage is e...

The challenges facing global agriculture via population increase, climate change and dietary choices are unprecedented and urgent. In the context of declining public funding for research and development in agriculture (ag R&D), we highlight the historically high returns on such investments and outline an economic rationale to continue government in...

With a farm gate value in 2016 of US$68 billion, grapes are the world’s third most valuable horticultural crop (after potatoes and tomatoes). Cultivation of grapes for fruit and wine began at least 7000 years ago in the Near East, and over the millennia, thousands of cultivars have been developed and selected for particular purposes. Nowadays, grap...

Global consumption patterns for alcoholic beverages are evolving, with some convergence in per capita consumption among nations as traditionally beer-drinking nations increase their consumption of wine and, conversely, wine-consuming nations shift towards beer. This article explores regional patterns of alcoholic beverage consumption within the Uni...

Global consumption patterns for alcoholic beverages are evolving, with some convergence in per capita consumption among nations, as traditionally beer-drinking nations increase their consumption of wine and, conversely, wine-consuming nations shift towards beer. In a forthcoming article (Hart and Alston, 2019), we explore regional patterns of alcoh...

This paper investigates whether the existing Denominations of Origin (DOs) provide useful quality signals for wine consumers. To test our conjecture that the large number of existing DOs is too many for the typical consumer, we investigate the patterns of co-movement among average monthly wholesale prices for red wines from the 11 main DOs in Borde...

Environmental and conservation scientists are increasingly being asked to justify their work in terms of benefits to society. This article describes economic theory for conceptualizing the benefits from environmental research, and provides a framework for estimating those benefits. In particular we discuss the evaluation of environmental science th...

U.S. farm productivity growth has direct consequences for sustainably feeding the world's still rapidly growing population, as well as U.S. competitiveness in international markets. Using a newly expanded compilation of multifactor productivity (MFP) estimates and associated partial-factor productivity (PFP) measures, we examine changes in the patt...

Sixty years ago, T.W. Schultz introduced the idea of the productivity "residual" to agricultural economics (1956). Schultz's main message was that growth in conventional inputs accounted for little of the observed growth in agricultural output, and that there was work to be done by agricultural economists to understand and ultimately eliminate this...

The dairy industry is of much interest worldwide because it has been subject to heavy government intervention. Central to the analysis of any dairy policy is a quantitative empirical understanding of the economic relationships in the industry. This paper models and measures the input demand relationships—especially, derived demand for farm milk as...

Cambridge Core - Natural Resource and Environmental Economics - Wine Globalization - edited by Kym Anderson

In July 2016, the U.S. Congress passed Senate Bill 764, which requires the U.S. Department of Agriculture to establish a national disclosure standard for GE foods, as a compromise between forces pressing for a much stricter labeling law versus forces that opposed mandatory labeling laws altogether. The legislation, now known as Public Law 114-216,...

The future path and pace of agricultural productivity growth areinextricably intertwined with investments in food and agricultural research and development (R&D). Looking back over half a century of evidence, we find that the lay of the global food and agricultural R&D land is changing, with indications that we are in the midst of an historic trans...

This book uses an economic framework to examine the consequences of U.S. farm and food policies for obesity, its social costs, and the implications for government policy. Drawing on evidence from economics, public health, nutrition, and medicine, the authors evaluate past and potential future roles of policies such as farm subsidies, public agricul...

In February 2016, the 60th Annual Conference of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (AARES) was held in Canberra, 20 years since we added ‘and Resources’ to the Society's name and Journal. As one way of commemorating those anniversaries, a pre-Conference workshop was held to highlight the contributions of the Society's agricu...

How much has food abundance, attributable to U.S. public agricultural R&D, contributed to high and rising U.S. obesity rates? In this paper we investigate the effects of public investment in agricultural R&D on food prices, per capita calorie consumption, adult body weight, obesity, public healthcare expenditures related to obesity, and consumer we...

Public and private investments in plant breeding have a proven track record of increasing agricultural productivity, significantly contributing to economic well-being or social welfare. Substantial investments in research and development are required before a new plant variety can be developed and released, which the private sector can only recoup...

Innovation in agriculture – itself an innovation some 10,000 years ago – is at the centre of many economic and social issues, either as a cause of problems or a solution to them. From the beginning, but especially over the past 150 years, innovation has transformed agriculture and in doing so has contributed to the transformation of whole economies...

Between 2001 and 2006, women participating in the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) weighed 15.5 lb more than eligible nonparticipants on average. Using a dataset (NHANES) that contains detailed information on a wide variety of demographic, socioeconomic, health and behavioral characteristics for 2018 SNAP-eligible women, we mak...

Agricultural research and development (R&D) has reduced poverty by making food more abundant and cheaper. It may also have affected the variability of agricultural production, prices, and incomes-but food price variability is less important to richer people. Recent evidence of a slowdown in agricultural productivity growth, combined with the rise o...

Many economists and others are interested in the phenomenon of rising alcohol content of wine and its potential causes. Has the alcohol content of wine risen—and if so, by how much, where, and when? What roles have been played by climate change and other environmental factors compared with evolving consumer preferences and expert ratings? In this p...

In an ever-more-competitive global market, vignerons compete for the attention of consumers by trying to differentiate their product while also responding to technological advances, climate changes and evolving demand patterns. In doing so, they highlight their regional and varietal distinctiveness. This paper examines the extent to which the wineg...

Viruses and related pathogens have no cure and impose high costs on nurseries and crop producers. Viral diseases typically spread through infected planting stock and plant-propagation material. However, virus spread can be minimized if virus-screened stock is used. This paper presents the costs and benefits of a virus-screening program for Grapevin...

Welfare trade-offs between intellectual property (IP) protections provided by patents and by plant variety protection (PVP) are explored. PVP breeders’ exemption weakens IP protection, but may speed the transfer of research gains across firms. A model is developed assuming firms optimise research given existing IP protection. A baseline scenario su...

Powdery mildew (PM) is a fungal disease that damages many crops, including grapes. In California, wine, raisin, and table grapes contributed over $3.9 billion to the value of farm production in 2011. Grape varieties with resistance to powdery mildew are currently being developed, using either conventional or transgenic approaches, each of which has...

Technological change in agriculture affects the variability of food prices both by changing the sensitivity of aggregate farm supply to external shocks and by changing the sensitivity of prices to supply or demand shocks. At the same time, by increasing the general abundance of food and reducing the share of income spent on food, agricultural innov...

Over the past five decades in the United States, total medical expenditures and the proportion of medical expenditures financed with public funds have both increased significantly. A substantial increase in the prevalence of obesity has contributed to this growth. In this study we measure the external cost of obesity in the form of publicly funded...

Agriculture is diverse and full of contradictions. The sector accounts for a comparatively small share of the global economy, but remains central to the lives of a great many people. In 2012, of the world's 7.1 billion people, an estimated 1.3 billion (19 percent) were directly engaged in farming, but agriculture (including the relatively small hun...

Several complicating issues arise in evaluating the returns to research into varietal improvements for perennial crops compared with annual crops. We elucidate and address these issues in the context of a case study of research aiming to develop varieties that are resistant to Pierce's disease (PD) of grapevines. PD imposes costs of over $100 milli...

Pierce's disease of grapevines, caused by a strain of the bacteria Xylella fastidiosa, threatens an industry with a farm value of production exceeding $3 billion per year. The grape industry incurs substantial costs from losses of vines to the disease and efforts to mitigate damage. Additional costs are borne by the public in providing programs tha...

Recent trends in farm productivity and food prices raise concerns about whether the era of global agricultural abundance is over. Agricultural R&D is a crucial determinant of agricultural productivity and production, and therefore food prices and poverty. In this article, we present entirely new evidence on investments in public agricultural R&D wo...

• With public investments in US animal agriculture research lagging behind inflation rates while middle income countries are maintaining or increasing their agricultural research budgets, the United States will have to find new strategies to remain a global leader in food production and efficiency. • Past investments in research have resulted in an...

Agricultural R&D accomplished a great deal in the 20th century, especially during the past 50 years. The resulting innovations have reduced poverty and improved the food security of the poor by helping to make food much more abundant and cheaper and reducing the vulnerability of the poor to food price shocks. Slower agricultural productivity growth...

Since 2000, approximately $50 million per year has been spent to control infestations of the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter (GWSS), an insect that spreads Pierce's Disease (PD). This amount includes the costs of state and federal efforts to monitor and control the GWSS, research on PD/GWSS, and compliance with the PD Control Program. Using a simulation...

Wheat Research Funding in Australia: The Rise of Public–Private–Producer Partnerships The Australian wheat research system was transformed profoundly by three institutional innovations. First, in 1990 the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) was created to provide levy‐funded R&D. Second, in 1994 the Plant Breeder’s Rights Act was pas...

Many commentators have speculated that agricultural policies have contributed to increased obesity rates in the United States, yet such claims are often made without any analysis of the complex links between real-world farm commodity support programs, prices and consumption of foods, and caloric intake. This article carefully studies the effects of...

In this article we use an economic model to link markets for agricultural commodities to food-product markets, and to trace the effects of agricultural policies on prices of food products and, consequently, on food consumption and calorie intake. Contrary to common claims, US agricultural policies have had generally modest and mixed effects on pric...

Initial motivation for the work in this chapter came from an observation that the sugar content of California wine grapes at harvest had increased by more than 9 per cent, from 21.4 degrees Brix in 1980 (average across all wines and all districts) to 23.3 degrees Brix in 2008.1 Sugar essentially converts directly into alcohol, so an 11 per cent inc...

Wine grapes contribute significantly to the economy of California, with a gross production value of more than $2 billion in 2010. Studies on economic issues in the industry require measures of demand response to price, but despite the economic importance of this industry, estimates of elasticities of demand for wine grapes have not been published....

We use newly constructed data to model and measure agricultural productivity growth and the returns to public agricultural research conducted in Uruguay over the period 1961–2010. We pay attention specifically to the role of levy‐based funding under INIA, which was established in 1990. Our results indicate that the creation of INIA was associated w...

The Australian Mushroom Growers Association (AMGA) has recently developed a revised marketing strategy to promote mushrooms using messages based on scientific findings about the nutrition and health consequences of regularly incorporating mush-rooms into meals. This article evaluates impacts based on a test-market experiment in Tasmania. We use a d...

In recent decades, we have witnessed in most countries a slowdown in the rate of growth in spending on agricultural Research and Development (R&D) — especially R&D oriented to enhancing farm productivity. This trend is most notable in the world’s richest countries that have in the past been the primary drivers of global agricultural science and inn...

A production function approach is used to estimate growth in farm productivity in the Australian wool industry from an estimated level of expenditure on wool production R & D. A market equilibrium model of the wool industry is then used to measure the share of total benefits from this productivity growth accruing to Australia and its wool growers....

Over the past ve decades in the United States both total medical expenditures and the proportion of medical expenditures nanced with public funds have increased sig- nicantly. A substantial increase in the prevalence of obesity has contributed to this growth. In this study we measure the external cost of obesity, in the form of publicly funded heal...

Recent trends in farm productivity and food prices raise concerns about whether the era of global agricultural abundance is over. Agricultural R&D is a crucial determinant of agricultural productivity and production, and therefore food prices and poverty. In this paper we review past and present agricultural production and productivity trends and p...

Food away from home (FAFH) comprises nearly half of all U.S. consumer food expenditures. Hence, policies designed to influence nutritional outcomes would be incomplete if they did not address the role of FAFH. However, because of data limitations, most studies of the response of food demand to policy changes have ignored the role of FAFH, and those...

We use newly constructed state-specific data to explore the implications of common modeling choices for measures of research returns. Our results indicate that state-to-state spillover effects are important, that the research and development lag is longer than many studies have allowed, and that misspecification can give rise to significant biases....

The sugar content of California wine grapes has increased significantly over the past 10–20 years, and this implies a corresponding increase in the alcohol content of wine made with those grapes. In this paper we develop a simple model of winegrape production and quality, including sugar content and other characteristics as choice variables along w...

Food away from home (FAFH) is an important component of the demand for food and hence, the nutritional intake of adults and children in the United States. Hence, policies designed to influence nutritional outcomes should address the role of FAFH. However, most studies of the response of demand for food to policy changes have ignored the role of FAF...

Selected Paper prepared for presentation at the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association's 2011 AAEA & NAREA Joint Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 24-26, 2011 ©Copyright 2011 by Kate Fuller, Julian Alston, and James Sanchirico. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by a...

Obesity encapsulates the increased risk of disease and premature death associated with excess fat, but it is usually measured using a simple function of weight and height known as the Body Mass Index (BMI). Economists use the BMI to determine the prevalence of obesity within the population, to estimate the "disease burden" created by obesity, to es...

Innovation in agriculture differs from innovation elsewhere in the economy in several important ways. In this chapter we highlight differences arising from (a) the atomistic nature of agricultural production, (b) the spatial specificity of agricultural technologies and the implications for spatial spillovers and the demand for adaptive research, an...

Summary Over the past 50 years and longer, the supply of food commodities has grown faster than the effective market demand, in spite of increasing population and per capita incomes. Consequently, the real (deflated) prices of food commodities have steadily trended down. The past increases in agricultural productivity and production, and the result...

The structure of U.S. agriculture changed dramatically over the past 100 years, and these changes coincided with large increases in agricultural productivity. Revolutionary technological advancements transformed inputs such as seed, fertilizers, and agricultural chemicals, and the quality of agricultural inputs—notably capital, labor and land—incre...

The implementation of the general model developed in Chapter 9 requires some specific choices about the detail of the model, beginning with the functional form. In the present chapter we discuss those choices, and present and interpret the resulting econometric estimates, along with the results of some analysis of the sensitivity of the estimates t...

Agricultural production, input use, and productivity have been evolving over time, with substantially different patterns among U.S. states; so, too, has the pattern of spending on agricultural research and extension by the federal and state governments. In our econometric models linking these patterns of R&D spending and agricultural productivity,...

At the center of our empirical work is a model of state-specific productivity growth as a function of investments in agricultural research. While the notions of productivity and changes in productivity are intuitive, it is not easy to develop meaningful measures of productivity or to identify the productivity consequences of investments in agricult...

How has public and private sector participation in agricultural R&D in the United States changed over the decades, and how has research spending on agriculture fared relative to research spending in all areas of science? Given the international interdependencies in agricultural R&D, how has research spending in the United States evolved relative to...

The history of agricultural R&D and related government policy in the United States is one of jointly evolving state and federal, public- and private-sector roles. The private role has always emphasized more-patentable inventions, or at least innovations from which the returns seem more appropriable by a variety of intellectual property rights or ot...

Many economists have argued that all farm subsidies are ultimately capitalized in land values. This chapter shows, both theoretically and empirically, that this is not so, although there is much room for disagreement as to the precise shares that accrue to landowners, farmers, and consumers. A review of econometric models in the literature, multima...

Many commentators claim that farm subsidies have contributed significantly to the “obesity epidemic” by making fattening foods relatively cheap and abundant and, symmetrically, that taxing “unhealthy” commodities or subsidizing “healthy” commodities would contribute to reducing obesity rates. In this article we use an equilibrium displacement model...

Agricultural economists helped develop farm programs to respond to the dire economic situation of the 1920s and 1930s. Some early authors appreciated that such policies created problems in markets for commodities and inputs. Over time, our understanding of agricultural issues and policies has deepened. Through the application of improved models and...

Almost 150 years have passed since U.S. public-sector agricultural research and development (R&D) began in earnest with the establishment of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the passage of the Morrill Land Grant College Act in 1862, to be followed 25 years later by the passage of the Hatch Experiment Station Act in 1887. During that time, and...

The history of American agriculture is one of continuing growth and constant change. During the first three hundred years, beginning with the settlement at Jamestown in 1607, growth and development in U.S. agriculture was achieved by doing more with more, at the extensive margin. As the frontier expanded and more land was brought into production by...

Modeling and measuring the productivity consequences of R&D is a tricky business. The challenge in attributing productivity to R&D is to establish which research, conducted by whom, and when, was responsible for a particular productivity increase. In other words, in modeling the effects of research on agricultural productivity the two principal are...

Over the past 100 years and more, U.S. agricultural production grew rapidly and the composition and location of production changed markedly, too. Different measures of agricultural output give different perspectives on these changes. This chapter provides a detailed assessment of the temporal and spatial patterns in the quantity and value of U.S. a...

In this chapter we develop the structure of our models for estimating the effects of U.S. public agricultural research on U.S. agricultural productivity. We begin by laying out a general model relating research spending to agricultural productivity. Because this general specification includes too many parameters to be estimated individually with an...

In Chapter 10 we reported the results from estimating models of productivity as a function of variables representing agricultural research and extension knowledge stocks. Various transformations of these models can be used to derive implications that are of interest to economists and policymakers. For instance, we can use the estimated model to eva...

This volume offers substantive clarification of the proper roles for public agricultural research and development (R&D) throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and introduces an analytical framework for assessing cross-country collective action in funding and carrying out research. To inform research policy decisions, the book provides a w...

This report contains a review of the literature on the role of agricultural research and development in fostering innovation and productivity in agriculture. The review seeks to clarify concepts and terminology used in the area, provide a critical assessment of approaches found in the literature, report main results, and draw inferences. A key find...

This paper begins with a review of the methods and assumptions used to measure capital service flows. Two data series on capital inputs in U.S. agriculture are briefly described and compared. We show that measures of capital services are sensitive to the treatment of interest rates. Notably, the use of fixed versus variable market rates significant...

This is a substantially revised version of “Capital Use Intensity and Productivity Biases.” Andersen, Matt A.; Alston, Julian M.; Pardey, Philip G., St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota, Department of Applied Economics; University of Minnesota, International Science and Technology Practice and Policy (InSTePP), 2007. (Staff paper P07-06; InSTePP p...

Julian M. Alston discusses the efficiency of income transfers to farmers through public agricultural research in the US. Julian says that his estimates indicate that for every dollar of US government spending on farm subsidies, farmers receive about 50 cents, landlords who rent land to farmers receive about 25 cents, domestic and foreign consumers...

largely stems from growth in demand for food, which is driven by growth in popu- lation and per capita incomes (especially the economic growth of the fast-growing econ- omies of Asia), coupled with new demands for biofuels. Growth in supply of agricultural commodities is primarily driven by growth in productivity, especially as growth in the avail-...