Search results

Recreancy is a concept that received William R. Freudenburg’s studied attention. Freudenburg moved beyond its conventional meaning – shirking duty – to a larger realm of irresponsibility by public actors who breach a societal trust they assume. This research focuses on the issue of “Peak Farmland,” a rendering of global carrying capacity that, we suggest, qualifies for what Freudenburg called “privileged discourse” and possibly recreancy. Scholars identified with dematerialized progress argue that finite farmland in the face of increasing population will improve human welfare and spare land for nature. This iconoclasm presents an arena for testing academic probity with respect to global food security. After an overview of past carrying capacity debates, we summarize the “Peak Farmland” position of the dematerialization school and suggest an important blind spot: the dematerialization of the global land base itself. Gathering the results of multiple studies on land loss, we offer evidence that the world’s warehouse of productive land is not just peaking but eroding on a grand scale. Ignoring this form of dematerialization while proclaiming nearly unlimited carrying capacity for Earth’s denizens strains the meaning of responsible scholarship.

The late 2000s Great Recession led to a surge of bank failures in the USA with nearly 300 banks failing from 2009 to 2010. Recalling the farm crises of the 1980s where the farm sector was pinpointed as one of the major precursors of such crises, this study is an attempt to validate if the agricultural sector can once again be considered as a major instigator of the current financial crises.

An early warning model is developed based on factors that may cause bank failures, with special attention given to the role of the agricultural lending portfolios of commercial banks. The model will have several time period versions that will determine the length of time prior to the actual bank bankruptcy declarations that early warning signals could be detected.

The empirical results indicate that credit exposure to the farm sector does not necessarily enhance a bank's tendency to fail or its probability of success or survival. This lends support to the reality that agricultural loan delinquency rates are consistently below the banks' overall loan delinquency rates, thus confirming that agricultural lenders are in relatively stronger financial health. This study instead finds that costly funding arrangements, increasing interest rate risk, and declining asset quality can be possible early warning signals that can be detected as far back as two or three years before eventual bank failure.

This study differentiates itself from previous studies by its special focus on the role of the agricultural finance industry in the ensuing economic crises. This study's early warning model also presents an extended version of previous empirical models as it accounts for measures of capital adequacy, asset quality, management risk, profitability, liquidity risk, loan portfolio composition and risk, funding arrangement, structural and macroeconomic variables.

In 2001, the Victorian state government approved the construction of a 500‐megawatt power station at Stonehaven by US multinational corporation, AES Power One. In 2002 plans had stalled and the company had withdrawn from the process. By March, 2002 the state government flagged that the power station was no longer required to meet power supply demands. This paper applies Beck’s theories of risk society and reflexive modernisation to a case study. It asks to what extent is Australia a risk society? Is the Stonehaven case part of a larger‐scale cultural and political movement and if so what are the consequences for corporate and civil citizenship and public communication in Australia?

This paper quantifies the effects of recent Federal Reserve interest rate changes, specifically recent hikes and cuts in the federal funds rate since 2015, on Midwest farmland values.

The authors apply three autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models to a panel data of state-level farmland values from 1963 to 2018 to estimate the dynamic effects of interest rate changes on the US farmland market. We focus on the I-states, Lakes states and Great Plains states. The models in the study capture both short-term and long-term impacts of policy changes on land values.

The authors find that changes in the federal funds rate have long-lasting impacts on farmland values, as it takes at least a decade for the full effects of an interest rate change to be capitalized in farmland values. The results show that the three recent federal funds rate cuts in 2019 were not sufficient to offset the downward pressures from the 2015–2018 interest rate hikes, but the 2020 cut is. The combined effect of the Federal Reserve's recent interest rate moves on farmland values will be positive for some time starting in 2022.

This paper provides the first empirical quantification of the immediate and long-run impacts of recent Federal Reserve interest rate moves on farmland values. The authors demonstrate the long-lasting repercussions of Federal Reserve's policy choices in the farmland market.

The purpose of this paper is to perform an investigative analysis of the distribution of agricultural growth in China and the evolution of the decision mechanism.

The kernel density estimation method was used to investigate the distribution of agricultural growth in China using 1988‐2008 panel data of the 29 provinces on the mainland. A nonparametric income distribution approach was employed to decompose China's agricultural output growth into farmland accumulation, capital deepening, labor‐scale change, technical change, and efficiency change based on stochastic frontier function. A further investigation of the evolution of the decision mechanism for agricultural growth was then performed using counterfactual analysis.

The results of this analysis indicate that: from 1996, the distribution of agricultural output per worker evolved from a unimodal into a bimodal distribution; technical change is the primary impetus to distribution shift; and capital deepening and efficiency change play a dominant role in the deformation of the distribution of agricultural output per worker from a unimodal to a bimodal distribution.

The paper is an original work and its methodology makes a meaningful contribution to understanding China's agricultural growth. That is, the use of income distribution analysis method to analyze agricultural growth does not only allow a more in‐depth understanding of the gap between regional agricultural growth rates, but also makes up for the existing lack of convergence in agricultural growth in China.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), a piece of US tax law that allows for tax‐deferred exchanges of like‐kind property.

The paper derives a theoretical premium value for exchanges and presents the first national level analysis of Federal tax data on the use of like‐kind exchanges involving farmland between 1999 and 2005.

There is significant interest in Section 1031 from stakeholders in rural communities because there is widespread belief that the recent growth in farmland values may have, in part, been stimulated by Section 1031 exchanges of farmland. Despite these concerns, little is known about the extent of such exchanges.

This paper provides insight into the value and use of the IRC's Section 1031 provision. Based on simulations of a theoretical model using plausible assumptions about asset growth, the paper shows how proposed tax changes will affect the tax value of the deferral.

Based on the brief historical review, the purpose of this paper is to expound the target and bottom line for the farmland institutional reform of in China, analyze the “Chinese scenes” and historical heritage of farmland institutional arrangement, evaluate the policies and their effects over the last four decades and outline the keynotes and possible direction of the future reform.

The paper builds the analytical clue of “institutional target – institutional heritage – policy effort – realistic dilemma – future direction” and review and forecast the Chinese farmland institutional reform.

The farmland institution is an important issue with Chinese characteristics. Over the last four decades, the farmland institutional reform in China has focused on “stabilizing the land property rights” and “promote the farmland transfer.” As the study indicates, the promotion of farmland transfer has not effectively improved the scale economy of agriculture and stabilizing land property rights by titling may restrain the development of farmland transfer market because farmland transfer is of special market logic.

It depends on the revitalization of farmland management rights to resolve the transaction constraint of personal property and its endowment effect in farmland transfer. And, classifying the land management property to involve farmers into the economy of division can be reference for the reform of traditional agriculture worldwide.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of farmland renting-in on planted grain acreage.

A survey data of five counties were analyzed with the two-stage ordinary least squares model.

Households renting-in land trended to plant more maize, and the more land was rented by a household the more maize was planted, while wheat acreage showed non-response to farmland renting-in.

Overall, the analysis suggests that policy makers should be prepared for different changing trends of grain crop acreage across the nation as farmland transfer continues. Future research should pay attention to the effect of farmland transfer on agricultural productivity and rural household income growth.

As the Chinese Government is promoting larger-scale and more mechanized farms as a way of protecting grain security, it is important to understand whether farmland renting-in will reduce planted grain acreage. This study provides empirical evidence showing the answer to that question may differ across different regions and depend on the particular grain crop in question.