喻园管理论坛2023年第60期(总第883期)

演讲主题: The Impact of Input and Output Farm Subsidies on Farmer Welfare, Income Disparity, and Consumer Surplus

主 讲 人: 汪玉兰，香港理工大学教授

主 持 人: 关旭，管理学院生产运作与物流管理系教授

活动时间: 2023年6月19日（周一） 10:00-11:30

活动地点: 管理大楼207室

主讲人简介：

Yulan Wang is currently a full professor and associated head (research) of the Department of the Logistics and Maritime Studies at Faculty of Business of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests lie in operations and supply chain management, socially sustainable operations, behavioral operations, and operations-IS-marketing interface. Her research work has been published in leading academic journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management. Her research works have received awards such as Second Prize, 2020 Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Awards (Humanities and Social Sciences) and 2020 China Information Economics Outstanding Output Award (Information Management). Dr Wang serves as a senior editor of Production and Operations Management and an associate editor of Decision Sciences and Omega. She is an editorial advisory board member of Transportation Research - Part E. She received her PhD degree in Business Administration from Duke University, and BS and MS degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

活动简介：

Due to a growing population and shrinking arable land, the world is facing a global food crisis. One important solution could be to subsidize farmers to sustain their production so that they can produce more food for consumers and earn more money for themselves. An efficient subsidy program should also aim to reduce income inequality among farmers, as measured by the Gini coefficient of farmers' income. In this paper, we examine and compare the effects of input and output farm subsidy programs. The input subsidy reduces the farmers' input purchasing costs, whereas the output subsidy reduces the farmers' output processing costs. By considering a continuum of infinitesimal price-taking farmers who are heterogeneous in their average yield rates, our equilibrium analysis of a game-theoretical model yields three results. First, both subsidy schemes reduce the aggregate income inequality measured by the Gini coefficient. However, they create the following “opposite” effects: the input subsidy decreases the income gap among farmers (under mild conditions), whereas the output subsidy increases it. Second, farmers with low yield rates prefer the input subsidy, whereas farmers with high yield rates prefer the output subsidy. Third, the output subsidy scheme is more effective in improving the total farmer income than the input subsidy scheme, whereas the input subsidy scheme is more effective in reducing income disparities and improving consumer surplus than the output subsidy scheme. Our results provide new insights for policymakers who are crafting subsidy schemes.