Conference Agenda

Understanding productive diversification strategies and the degree of dependence on natural resources is essential for designing policies that reduce extractive pressures and enhance the resilience of small-scale fishing (SSF) communities. This study examines diversification strategies adopted by SSF households in a coastal region, employing the Sustainable Livelihoods (SL) and Site Assessment (SA) frameworks to link household decisions with territorial and institutional conditions. A Multinomial Logit Model (MLM) was used to analyze six types of strategies, including open access fishing, complementary fishing activities, and off-fishing livelihoods. Additionally, an Instrumental Variable Ordinary Least Squares (IV-OLS) model was applied to estimate the effects of diversification intensity on household income. The results reveal that a combination of individual capacities, organizational strength, and local environmental characteristics influences diversification decisions. Determinants such as self-organization capacity, technical assistance, labor availability, and access to economic infrastructure around landing sites play a significant role in enabling multi-activity strategies. Territorial factors, including urbanization, road access, and essential services, further shape both diversification intensity and income outcomes. The findings underscore the critical role of community-based institutions and spatial context in shaping adaptive strategies and economic sustainability. The study highlights the combined role of community-based institutions and spatial context in shaping sustainable livelihoods, offering a novel empirical integration of SL and SA frameworks to inform territorial policy design in coastal fisheries.

In developing countries where households rely heavily on fuelwood as their primary energy source, fuelwood collection can be a significant driver of illegal logging. National parks in Bangladesh are designated as protected areas where logging activities are prohibited. We analyzed primary data to investigate the potential for illegal fuelwood sales by vendors in local markets in northeastern Bangladesh. Our data allowed us to identify whether the fuelwood sold by a vendor had been harvested from species found in protected areas. From the vendor-level analysis of illegal transactions, we found that illegal fuelwood sales have a nuanced relationship with ownership and licensing status. Vendors who own their sales sites long-term are less likely to engage in the sale of illegal fuelwood compared to those who rent their spaces temporarily.

Trade barriers imposed simultaneously on agricultural inputs and final products---``twin tariffs''---can compress producer margins and reshape food-system resilience in ways that single-commodity analyses miss. We study this mechanism using China's 2018--2025 retaliatory tariffs on U.S.\ alfalfa hay (an upstream feed input) and U.S.\ dairy products (a downstream output). Combining a large-country partial-equilibrium model with vertical cost linkage and monthly bilateral trade data from 2005 to 2025, we show that alfalfa imports adjusted primarily on the price margin because high-quality forage is difficult to substitute, while dairy imports adjusted on the quantity margin through origin diversion to New Zealand and the EU. China's farm-gate milk price rose 0.52\% during the first trade-war period (2018--2022) and attenuated as importers diversified. Welfare counterfactuals indicate a net loss of \$11.7 billion, exceeding the sum of single-tariff losses by \$2.6 billion through cross-market amplification. A domestic upstream subsidy reduces the net loss by 76\%, substantially outperforming equivalent downstream protection.

Local communities rely on small-scale fisheries as a source of income but also as part of their cultural identity and heritage. The cultural value of small-scale fisheries has been used as an argument to support these fisheries; yet there is a scarcity of estimates of their value in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by estimating the cultural value of small-scale fisheries in Germany. We show that this value is substantial and should not be overlooked by stakeholders. In fact on average each German adult resident is willing to pay up to 102 euros to preserve this cultural value and this is equivalent to an annual value up to 7.1 billion Euros million euros for Germany.

Despite the existence of widespread payment for ecosystem services programs to incentivize agricultural practices such as cover crops (CCs), adoption remains low. The economics literature has thus devoted considerable attention to the factors that influence enrollment in CC incentive programs, including applications of discrete choice experiments (DCEs) to predict how changes to current programs might impact enrollment and adoption. Most of this work considers changes to only a few program attributes of traditional interest to economists, such as payments and contract lengths, while overlooking contract restrictions on farm operations that directly influence the private benefits and costs of CC adoption, such as the CC varieties that qualify for cost sharing, required seeding rates, and planting deadlines. This paper develops an integrated theoretical and empirical model to evaluate farmers’ enrollment decisions in CC incentive programs, accounting for flexibility in multiple types of contract restrictions that impact the net private benefits of CC adoption. The model is implemented using data from a DCE on CC program enrollment among farmers in Maryland, USA. Results show that enrollment choices are influenced heavily by attributes that are almost universally omitted from DCEs in the literature. Findings suggest the insights that can be provided via DCEs that consider program enrollment within the context of farm operations and the net private benefits of adoption.

EU industrial policy increasingly shields energy-intensive, trade-exposed firms from rising energy costs, largely through energy tax exemptions. Using German firm-level and state-aid data, we show that most of these exemptions are allocated through a statutory eligibility schedule conditioned on energy intensity, not export exposure, generating wide dispersion in firms' effective energy prices. The design creates two distortions: it reallocates output toward the most energy-intensive firms, and it penalizes abatement, since saving energy can cost a firm its eligibility. We then build a heterogeneous-firm open-economy model to study how exemptions interact with a carbon tax and affect emissions. In the model, exemptions have two opposing effects. By keeping production at home, they limit leakage to dirtier foreign firms. But the same reallocation toward energy-intensive firms raises the emission intensity of domestic output. The net effect on global emissions is ambiguous: exemptions can raise emissions even when domestic production is on average cleaner than foreign. At equal leakage protection, an output-based rebate dominates the exemption on efficiency and emissions. An export subsidy is intermediate but legally constrained.

Energy transition in the Global North, particularly in countries like the United Kingdom, is closely linked to the shift towards more sustainable heating systems. Technologies such as heat pumps and hydrogen boilers are gaining attention as alternatives to traditional gas boilers, because they allow reduction in carbon emissions and support the move towards cleaner energy sources. This paper investigates household preferences for alternative domestic heating systems in the United Kingdom and the potential barriers to its adoption, focusing on heat pumps and hydrogen boilers as potential substitutes for conventional gas heating. Results show that individuals are more likely to update their current heating system but adopting similar technologies. Heat pumps were found to be more likely to be adopted than hydrogen systems and this is explained by the similarities with the current gas boilers, mostly present in UK households. Installation costs, awareness (information), education and age were significant factors influencing adoption of heating systems. Finally, technical information and benefits of the new systems were found to greater influence the decisions than environmental benefits, which is relevant for the design of the policy implementation strategy.