Agricultural Policy and the Benefits of Ozone Control

In this paper, the authors describe their approach to estimating the benefits of ozone control. They follow the damage function approach and rely on an economic assessment model developed for EPA (Kopp et al.) to estimate benefits. They provide a diagrammatic analysis of the dependence of these benefits on agricultural policies. Next they describe four alternative national agricultural policies and the policy analysis model developed by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) used to estimate the consequences of these policies for crop production and acres planted over the 1986-90 period. Finally, they provide measures of the social welfare benefits of a 10% reduction in ozone registered through the soybean, corn, wheat, and cotton markets over this five-year period assuming alternative agricultural policies are in effect.