![\"Associate](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/10\/140822_Nathan_Tefft_Tenure_41.jpg\")
<\/a>Associate Professor of Economics Nathan Tefft. (Sarah Crosby\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n
After all, cheaper fruit might boost demand, helping producers while benefiting consumers. Plus, organic food is a growing sector of the agricultural economy. In Maine alone, organic sales grew from $37 million in 2012 to $60 million by 2017.<\/p>\n
These what-if questions were answered in \u201cThe Distributional Impact of a Green Payment Policy for Organic Fruit<\/span><\/a>,\u201d recently published in <\/span>PLOS One<\/span><\/i>, with Tefft as a coauthor along with corresponding author Erik Nelson and John Fitzgerald of Bowdoin.<\/span><\/p>\n To a layperson, a subsidy to support clean technology might sound like an all-round win. But as Tefft says, \u201ceconomists are always looking at tradeoffs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n For example, it\u2019s known that some price subsidies for clean technology, such as those for electric cars in the U.S., have been shown to be \u201cstrongly regressive,\u201d meaning that they benefit wealthy buyers<\/span><\/a> who are able to afford the pricey vehicles.<\/span><\/p>\n Partly for that reason, Tefft and his coauthors were eager to look at how a price subsidy on organic fruit, even a modest 10 percent subsidy, might affect all households, poor, middle-income, and wealthy, \u201cabout which there is little current evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n So the researchers reviewed a huge dataset: the purchasing patterns, from 2011 to 2013, of some 60,000 U.S households who record every single household purchase as members of Nielsen\u2019s Consumer Panel.<\/p>\n Would various barriers \u2014 such as less availability or less demand \u2014 make subsidized products less accessible to poor households?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Even before tackling the data, Tefft and his colleagues thought they had an inkling: According to previous research, certain wealthier households \u2014 urban, educated, older, and married with at least one child at home \u2014 are more likely to purchase organic produce than less-wealthy households.<\/p>\n Given that lead, the researchers wondered: Would a 10 percent price subsidy on organic foods favor those households from a certain income class?<\/p>\n Would various barriers \u2014 such as less availability or less demand \u2014 make subsidized products less accessible to poor households? Worse yet, would a subsidy merely \u201cimprove the welfare of more educated and wealthier U.S. households\u201d \u2014 another example of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer?<\/p>\n