Redistribution or Public Good: Which Direction for the New Farm Bill?

Bruce Babcock

Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications from Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University

Abstract: Farm Bill programs run the gamut from crop insurance to conservation, from invasive species control to nutrition subsidies, from agricultural research to commodity subsidies. These programs fall into two broad categories. Some, such as the nutrition programs, commodity programs, and the crop insurance program have an objective of redistributing income from taxpayers to specific groups of people. Others, such as agricultural research, conservation, and food inspection programs have an objective of improving economic efficiency by providing goods and services that the private sector under-provides, or by mitigating undesirable market outcomes. The key decision that the Senate and House Agricultural Committees will need to make in the 2018 Farm Bill is how to split up a fixed amount of funds between redistributive programs and those that improve efficiency.

Date: 2017-06
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.card.iastate.edu/ag_policy_review/article/?a=68 Full Text (text/html)
https://www.card.iastate.edu/ag_policy_review/pdf/spring-2017.pdf Full Issue Text (application/pdf)

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:ias:cpaper:apr-spring-2017-4

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications from Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().