CONTENTS

How Economists Conduct Economic Evaluation

Director’s Corner

Next Meeting

NEC-63 Spring 2001 March22-23, 2001 Washington, DC Policy and Distribution Issues in Agricultural Commodity Promotion Programs

Director's Corner

by Harry M. Kaiser

With the passage of the 1996 FAIR Act, and the requirement that all federal checkoff programs have economic evaluations every several years, we have seen an explosion of economic studies in recent years. Indeed, many readers of the Quarterly have gone through the experience of having their program studied in this manner for the first time over this period. Still, many people do not have a very good understanding of how economists examine the economic impacts of checkoff programs, and how benefit-cost ratios, or return on investments are measured.

With this in mind, we are devoting this issue of the NICPRE Quarterly to describing the basic methodology used by economist in deriving checkoff program economic impacts. Our goal is to give program managers a better conceptual understanding of this economic paradigm.