The Status and Changing Face of Ohio Agriculture
by: Ani Katchova, Associate Professor and Farm Income Enhancement Chair, Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, The Ohio State University Farmers deal with many stressors, most of which are out of their control: extreme weather, market changes, COVID-19, trade wars, fluctuating market…
Carbon in soils and trees: What should farmers and society worry about?
Carbon in soils and trees: What should farmers and society worry about? Brent Sohngen, Professor of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, Ohio State University As the US re-enters the Paris Agreement and companies all over the world work to become…
Re-entering Paris Agreement could reduce pollution, cost most Americans little
By Brent Sohngen This article ran in the Columbus Dispatch on February 13, 2021: https://www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/columns/2021/02/13/re-entering-paris-agreement-likely-reduce-pollution-cost-americans-little/4282378001/ One of the first official acts of President Joe Biden was to re-enter the Paris Agreement, that 2015 pact among most of the world’s countries to…
Markets and consumers, not president, control oil’s future
The following appeared in the Columbus Dispatch on November 4, 2020: https://www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/11/04/column-markets-and-consumers-not-president-control-oils-future/6136112002/ Brent Sohngen, AED Economics, Ohio State University For practically 150 years, oil has been at the center of the American economy. At first, it provided a source…
“Power-Based” Bargaining Over Trade: What Has Been the Economic Cost?
The U.S.-China trade war represents a natural experiment in the sense that we have not seen such wide-ranging increases in tariffs since the 1930s, when Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (Bown and Zhang, 2019). Not surprisingly, applied trade economists…
“Power-Based” Bargaining Over Trade: Myopic Behavior by the United States?
Analysis of the current administration’s trade policy choices has typically interpreted them in terms of a zero-sum game, i.e., rather than generating mutual benefits in a positive-sum game, international trade is a game where economically, one country is a winner…
Economic Myths in the Age of Populism and Implications for Ohio
The Winter 2020 Swank Advisory Council meeting featured presentations from Dr. Mark Partridge, professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at The Ohio State University and chair of the C. William Swank Program in Rural-Urban Policy, and…
How Big are the Damages from Algal Blooms for Beaches and Fishing in Lake Erie?
By Brent Sohngen (sohngen.1@osu.edu) A consulting company, Key-Log Economics has just released a report estimating the economic benefits from phosphorus reductions in Lake Erie (http://www.keylogeconomics.com/lakeerievalue.html). This report adds up estimates from a variety of studies and attempts to calculate a…
How Climate Change is Affecting the Great Lakes
In areas from rainfall to lake levels, fish to algal blooms, shipping to agriculture, drinking water quality to public health, “Climate change is causing significant and far-reaching impacts on the Great Lakes and the Great Lakes region.” That’s according to the science-based Assessment…
Carbon tax or Green New Deal?
Published in Columbus Dispatch, March 15, 2019 by Brent Sohngen Ohioans are about to get another taste of carbon taxes if legislators approve some amount of a gasoline-tax increase as proposed by Gov. Mike DeWine. The legislature will never call…
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