Use of Compliance Rewards in Agri-environmental Schemes

Yuki Yano and David Blandford

Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2009, vol. 60, issue 3, pages 530-545

Abstract: Ensuring that farmers comply with the terms of agri-environmental schemes is an important issue. This paper explores the use of a 'compliance-reward' approach under heterogeneous net compliance costs with respect to cost-share working lands programmes such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) in the United States. Specifically, we examine the use of a reward under asymmetric information and output price uncertainty. We examine two possible sources of financing under the assumption of budget neutrality: (i) funds obtained by reducing monitoring effort; and (ii) money saved by reducing the number of farmers enrolled. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each source of funding and analyse these numerically for both risk-neutral and risk-averse farmers. We also examine the trade-off between increased expenditure on monitoring effort and compliance rewards when additional budgetary resources are available. We show that under certain conditions a compliance reward can increase compliance rates. For risk-averse farmers, however, conditions that ensure a positive outcome become more restrictive. Copyright (c) 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2009 The Agricultural Economics Society.

Date: 2009

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