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When I am thinking about Scotland and the average diet of its residents, I am not thinking about fresh fruit. Indeed, obesity rates there are about the highest anywhere in the world, thanks to a combination of greasy food, high alcohol consumption and general lack of exercise. Fresh fruit does not seem to be high in demand, yet there is a paper that studies the price elasticity of different types of fruit in Scotland.
That paper is by Cesar Revoredo-Giha and Wojciech Florkowski and unfortunately it does not mention any numbers about the level of demand, in particular compared to other regions. The paper, like many papers in agricultural economics has a very narrow focus and it is not clear at all why it would be of interest to anybody outside of Scotland (or even in Scotland, visibly). Is there any lesson to be learned for the rest of us? Anything that could generalize? Some policy implication to get people to eat more healthily? The paper was prepared for a conference in Poland. Why would the paper be of interest there?
That paper is by Cesar Revoredo-Giha and Wojciech Florkowski and unfortunately it does not mention any numbers about the level of demand, in particular compared to other regions. The paper, like many papers in agricultural economics has a very narrow focus and it is not clear at all why it would be of interest to anybody outside of Scotland (or even in Scotland, visibly). Is there any lesson to be learned for the rest of us? Anything that could generalize? Some policy implication to get people to eat more healthily? The paper was prepared for a conference in Poland. Why would the paper be of interest there?
8 comments:
You are touching here on a long standing issue with agricultural economics departments, and the reason they are all changing their name to "applied economics department." There is rarely anything ground breaking or generalizable in their research. It is just about applying well-established techniques to very local or narrow issues. And the reason they can get away with it is that they are getting grant money, and plenty of it, for this.
In "regular" economics, this type of research would never get published. It is the realm of consultants who write a report for very few eyes, and rightly so.
This is an indictment of agricultural economics, and an overdue one. There is no reason that such a large amount resources should be devoted to the study of a minor sector of the economy, and in a way that has no positive externalities for research on the rest of the economy.
I am not denying that there are some good people in those departments. They should move to regular economics departments and the agecon departments should be closed. Let the local chambers of commerce do that kind of research.
Agecon departments have their usefulness. Where would the not-good-enough economists go to otherwise?
The students who fail out of our PhD program transfer to the AgEcon program and graduate, some with prizes for best dissertation. That says it all.
I would love to see a reaction from the authors, or at least from somebody in the field.
I'm 'in the field' so to speak, though I'm just a master's student, and I find this embarrassing. This kind of triviality takes the 'applied' mission of ag econ departments to an absurdity. I think a fair amount of it comes down to the fact that industry seems to view Ag Econ departments as business consultants, and don't know what economics is really for, and don't care to, though I'm aware that some would say the same thing about ag econ students. It's very frustrating, because those of us who don't want our departments to be this way are drowned out by the ag industry's bags of money, and by a bunch of garbage about how doing what basically amounts to basic business consulting is somehow part of the 'noble mission of land grant institutions.'
I'm not bitter about this at all.
I think you are very unfair about this paper. It's not bad research. I should say that I'm not linked to the authors in any way and I don't do this kind of research. The authors do compare their results to the rest of the UK (citing a study appropriately done by Tiffin) and as they point themselves on the first page, it's part of a wider background report on the Scottish economy prepared for the Scottish government.
But the bigger point here is that in other (science) subjects many researchers spent their entire careers establishing the facts of small topics. To get their results validated they publish in refereed journals. With the evidence peer reviewed other researchers, theorists etc. can then stand on their shoulders to build theories that synthesis evidence and so on. I think that in large part economics lacks such a culture of fact building and as result many grand theories are built on shaky foundations. So, I cheer the humble researcher who does something small but useful, rather than mocking them with a tag of 'bad research' in an anonymously written blog.
So let me get this straight-- some silly instrumental variable cute-o-nomics paper by Levitt on sumo wrestlers = "regular" economics, but estimating the demand for fresh fruit in Scotland is an abhorrent waste of resources? This whole blog post and especially comments just smacks of the type of superficial institutional favoritism that plagues this discipline and makes me nauseous. I get the feeling you'd not even blink an eye if this was some silly little IV paper by Card or Levitt.
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