补贴、福利与政策性农业保险——基于福利经济学的一个深入探讨

目前国内对政策性农业保险的研究主要是基于使用消费者剩余方法的福利分析.然而,这种分析存在一定的缺陷,主要表现在消费者剩余方法忽略了农户的风险态度,难以解释农业保险对作物产量影响较小时的福利增加情况,从而难以作为政策性农业保险的理论依据.并且,由传统理论推导出农业保险具有外部性以及准公共产品的结论显得并不严密.基于传统分析的思想,引入效用最大化的方法对农业保险在影响与不影响作物供给曲线右移两种情况的福利分析,在一定程度上可以完善原有理论体系.

Subsidies, Welfare and Policy-oriented Agricultural Insurance: An Intensive Study Based on Welfare Economics

Agricultural insurance has acquired more and more attention from both theoretical researchers and policy-makers since 2004.Agricultural insurance is now policy-oriented and subsidized.However,the authors found that the theoretical analysis of policy-oriented agricultural insurance was not close.There are three questions in the traditional analysis.Firstly,will agricultural insurance shift the supply curve toward southeast greatly when low coverage is provided in China? Secondly,can the welfare changes of supply curve shift be explained by the externality,and can subsidy on agricultural insurance be deduced by the nature of the quasi-public goods? Thirdly,is the consumer surplus method fit in analyzing Chinese agricultural insurance welfare issues?It is pointed out that traditional analysis has a strong hypothesis that agricultural insurance will affect farmers' production decision.But,the author's former empirical studies have not revealed that agricultural insurance has strikingly affected the production on the condition of low coverage.The traditional hypothesis is not suitable to reality.Hence,there is a defect of the consumer surplus method in analyzing the agricultural insurance welfare and the traditional method is not fit for analyzing the agricultural insurance welfare issues when it neglects the risk attitude of the farmers.By a review of the theoretical study of externality and quasi-public goods nature,the researchers analyzed the agricultural insurance effects on social welfare on two levels.The first level is how agricultural insurance affects agriculture,and the second is how agriculture affects the society.We pinpointed that externality and quasi-public goods nature of agricultural insurance cannot be the theoretical base for policy-oriented agricultural insurance.We introduced a utility maximization theory to analyze the social welfare effects of agricultural insurance on two conditions,whether agricultural insurance shifts the production curve or not.We improved the theoretical analysis method by building up a mathematical model.Agricultural insurance is an important tool in spreading the agricultural risk and the goals of policy-oriented agricultural insurance should be put on equity more than efficiency.Although there is agricultural insurance experiment aiming at the stabilization of farmers' income and enhancement of their welfare due to the finance capability of different counties,we think that it will be more feasible for low coverage,low premium experiment in most of the regions in China.