Insurance subsidies, climate change, and innovation: Implications for crop yield resiliency

Anna Chemeris, Yong Liu and Alan P. Ker

Food Policy, 2022, vol. 108, issue C

Abstract: Innovation in the agricultural sector will determine our ability to reduce food insecurity and feed nine billion people by 2050. Concomitantly, most of the world’s agricultural crop production is produced under heavily subsidized insurance. Changes in food security will be largely driven by the nexus of innovation, climate change, and the policy institutions under which production agriculture operates. Subsidized insurance tends to be the policy choice in most developed countries. In the United States, crop insurance subsidies increased from 30% to 60% between 1994 and 2000, bringing about a significant increase in program participation. We use this increase as a natural experiment to empirically estimate the impact of insurance subsidies on rates of technological change and measures of yield resiliency in corn (maize) yields. Our study results indicate that, after accounting for the introduction of GM seeds and changing climate, subsidies caused a decrease in various yield resiliency measures.

Keywords: Insurance subsidies; Technological change; Yield resiliency; Changing climate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030691922200015X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jfpoli:v:108:y:2022:i:c:s030691922200015x

DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2022.102232

Access Statistics for this article

Food Policy is currently edited by J. Kydd

More articles in Food Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().