Non-farmers’ willingness to farm: a large-scale choice experiment to identify policy options that can induce new entry to the agricultural industry

Taro Takahashi, Kaori Maruya and Toru Nakajima

No 236368, 90th Annual Conference, April 4-6, 2016, Warwick University, Coventry, UK from Agricultural Economics Society

Abstract: With the farming population aging across the developed world, securing a new generation of agricultural producers is an important step towards overcoming global food problems. The vast majority of the existing literature on new entry to agriculture base their analysis on data obtained from existing farms and farmers, an approach not necessarily adequate because the people who actually make decisions about entry are non-farmers. In this paper, we report the results of a large-scale choice experiment conducted in Japan to investigate the willingness of the country’s non-farming population to enter the agricultural industry. The results of a random parameter logit estimation showed that, in the absence of farmland, technical support and guaranteed sales, the agricultural income required to induce entry of an average Japanese person is approximately ¥22.0M (£121,000), a level well above their present income of ¥5.4M (£29,700); however, when all three services are provided, this value drastically lowers to ¥4.6M (£25,300). In addition, a ¥1M (£5,500) increase in agricultural income raises a person’s likelihood to enter the industry by 1.6 percentage points. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to quantitatively investigate non-farmers’ willingness to enter the agricultural industry.

Keywords: Agricultural; and; Food; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dcm
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aesc16:236368

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.236368

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