Trade Adjustment Assistance For Farmers In The U.S.: Program Participation And Policy Impact

Lee, Yu Na

Trade Adjustment Assistance For Farmers In The U.S.: Program Participation And Policy Impact

Abstract

The Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) for Farmers program, first established by the Reform Act in 2002, assists farmers adversely affected by import competition through cash benefits and technical assistance. The Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 re-authorized and modified the program. The program has been mostly underused, with petitions filed for only 0.8% of all the state-level field commodities for which price data is available. In Chapter 2, I address this puzzle of low program participation by using the rare events logistic regression method and find that access to information and farmers' incentives to file petitions, rather than factors from eligibility criteria, determine the program participation. Most notable changes in the Recovery Act of 2009 are the easing of eligibility criteria and the use of decoupled instead of coupled cash payments. In Chapter 3, using an inclusive model that allows for different policy settings-coupled and decoupled payments and different eligibility criteria-I find that the new seemingly "decoupled" TAA program, as well as the original "coupled" TAA program, distort prices and optimal outputs, and increase farmers' welfare.

Date Issued

2014-01-27

Keywords

trade adjustment assiatance; agriculture; program participation

Committee Chair

Chau, Ho Yan

Committee Member

Just, David R.

Degree Discipline

Agricultural Economics

Degree Name

M.S., Agricultural Economics

Degree Level

Master of Science

Types

dissertation or thesis