An Agri-environmental Scheme for Reducing Inputs Subjected to Accidental Spillage: An Application to Agricultural Burnings by Smallholders
提出一种农业环境计划，通过合同机制激励小农户减少农业焚烧面积，在政府面临信息不对称和风险的情况下，实现了99%的完全信息效率，优于传统的命令控制方法。
Command-and-control (CAC) is the dominant approach for regulating agricultural fires in developing countries, despite its negative impact on low-income smallholders. Agri-environmental schemes are emerging as an alternative and this paper presents a scheme for hiring the reduction of inputs liable to be accidentally spilled. This is applied to burned area reduction by smallholders, with the governmental principal exposed to great risk due to the coupling of the need to advance subsidy and unobservability of both intended burned area and heterogeneous reduction cost. Optimal contract menus were derived for three situations differing in the number of contracts in which non-compliance could be detected irrespective of accidents’ size. A rate of 99% of the perfect information efficiency was achieved, as revealed by a numerical simulation based on a range of Brazilian Amazon datasources, including a discrete choice experiment, satellite fire data and mechanization cost. Results were robust to parametric sensitivity analysis, which also pointed to a small contribution by high cost smallholders of up to 10% of total reduction. CAC proved inefficient by pooling together smallholders differing substantially on cost, revealing that contracts are recommendable as a better policy option.