外文翻译----美国农作物保险计划的政治经济学(编辑修改稿)

外文翻译----美国农作物保险计划的政治经济学(编辑修改稿)内容摘要：

ss. Agents and panies and farmers have an incentive to lobby Congress to pass laws that work to their favor. Because taxpayer subsidies are the only source of revenue for panies or agents, any lobbying that they do uses taxpayer funds. There exist two sources of petition in this model. Agents pete for farmers business and panies pete for agents business. The agent petition for farmers’ business cannot include price petition because of laws passed by Congress at the behest of agents. So agents must pete in terms of service. The types of service that can be offered include educating farmers about the types of insurance coverage offered。 lowering the farmer cost of filling out required forms。 and keeping farmers informed of any information that may prove useful to farmers. All of these services are of secondorder importance to farmers because either they are onetime benefits or because they do not directly increase farmers’ profits. By default, a farmer’s business remains with an agent year after year. So unless an agent convinces a farmer to switch agents, no switch will take place. To a farmer, the benefit of switching must be greater than the cost of switching, which involves some paperwork, possibly alienating a local neighbor or business person, and search costs for an agent that can provide superior service. Because there are positive switching costs and only indirect benefits, the incentive for most farmers to switch is not very high, although exact measurement of the incentive would be difficult. Consequently, the productivity of agent investments designed to induce farmers to switch will not be high. In equilibrium, each agent invests an optimal amount to keep his or her business and to perhaps attract new business, and each farmer has found the agent where the benefits of further switching are outweighed by the costs. Entry costs, although nominally seemingly low, are actually quite high because new entrants will find it difficult to build up their book of business by inducing an adequate number of farmers to switch. Thus each agent has essentially a captive book of business. Average Crop Revenue Elections ACRE is an optional program that if chosen by a farmer would reduce a farmer’s direct payment by 20%, eliminate countercyclical payments, and dramatically reduce the farmer’s loan rate. In exchange, a farmer would receive a state revenue guarantee equal to 90% of the product of Olympic average of the previous 5 years of state yields and the average of the previous 2 years’ season average prices. If the product of actual state yield and season average price is less than this guarantee, then a farmer will receive the difference (up to 25% of the guarantee) on 85% of planted acres for all program crops. Farmers can choose ACRE beginning with the 2020 crop year. Once chosen, the choice cannot be revoked for the life of the farm bill. Because this new program looks back in time for the price that it uses to set the guarantee, the actual path of prices will determine how many farmers will find it profitable to choose ACRE. For the 2020 crop year, the price used to set the guarantee were the 2020/2020 and 2020/2020 marketing year prices. The key to farmer participation will be the 2020 expected season average price. If market prices stay substantially above the ACRE price, then farmers will not be receiving any marketing loan gains or countercyclical payments because the loan rates and target prices are so low relative to expected market price. But ACRE will also be providing an outofthemoney guarantee so farmers may feel that the 20% cut in direct payments is too high a price to pay for potential ACRE payments. In this case, note that the 2020 ACRE price will be even higher than the 2020 price so farmers would know that their 2020 ACRE guarantee would be even higher than the 2020 guarantee so that there is little downside of signing up in 2020. If many farmers participate in ACRE, then marketing loans and countercyclical payments will not play an important role in the next farm. But before we can conclude that。