Food and Resource Economics

Staff

Yasuhiro Nakashima, Professor
Tomoaki Nakatani, Associate Professor

Outline

The agriculture has two major functions. The first is to produce foods which are indispensable for human beings to survive. The other is to maintain the ecosystem and resources of land and water which are decisively important for affluent and pleasant livelihood. The agriculture could forward us unmeasurable worthiness beyond market values in terms of GDP. The laboratory of Food and Resource Economics places great emphasis on their functions in our education and research actions. We believe that addressing the modern issues of agriculture leads to designing our way of life. The motto of our laboratory is “warm heart and cool head (Alfred Marshall).”

Education policy

The laboratory of Food and Resource Economics is composed of two study units such as food economics and resource economics. After enrolled in graduate school, every student is required to select either study unit according to their research interests. The unit of food economics, named as ‘food team’, focuses mainly on studying economic issues of food system and food safety. The unit of resource economics, named as ‘resource team’, focuses mainly on studying environment and resource conservation related to agricultural land and irrigation. Any students are likely to include an analytical perspective of assessing institutional, organizational, administrative matters in their studies. Needless to say, agriculture is our centerpiece of research interest. Neither food nor resource economic analysis could be conducted without any consideration on agricultural sector, respectively from the viewpoint of downstream and upstream sectors in the whole system. Our laboratory offers consciously dialogue opportunities to exchange their own information and communicate with each other about agricultural, food, and rural affairs beyond their study unit. Our integrated approach of considering both downstream and upstream sectors can effectively accomplish in depth understanding of the modern agriculture and contributing to designing of policy measures as a whole. A hands-on principle of fact finding prior to empirical study is always kept as the most important code of research conduct in our laboratory. While students are mostly recommended to implement field surveys and obtain original data from an actual business, an econometric analysis is guided as much as possible when they scrutinize their research subjects.

Research topics

  • An economic analysis on food safety policy
  • A direct communication approach to ensure mutual trust between producers and consumers
  • A contribution of service industry to development of dairy farming
  • A service science study on irrigation system
  • A geographic information system and spatial econometric analysis on Yunnan terrace paddy field
  • An econometric study on development of Chinese agriculture

Publications

  • Aizaki, H., Y. Nakashima, K. Ujiie, H. Takeshita, and K. Tahara (2010) Influence of Information About Agrochemicals Provided via Internet-Enabled Mobile Phones on Consumer Valuation of Food, Journal of Agricultural & Food Information, 11, pp.209-221.
  • Takahashi, T., H. Aizaki, T. Sato, N. Guo, Y. Nakashima, S. Ogawa, N. Yamada, X. Zheng (2012) In-crisis delivery rate: a novel measure of success in communal water management. Paddy Water Environment 11, pp.503-511.
  • Nakashima, Y. (2012) An institutional framework and economic system for food safety and trust, Journal of Food System Research, 19(2), pp.55-61 (in Japanese).
  • Sato, T., A. Imai, T. Murakami, Y. Nishihara, R. Kikushima, S. Nakajima, T. Takahashi, Y. Nakashima (2013) Geo-agricultural database as a platform for mechanism design, J Agric Food Inf, 14(4), pp.334-347.
  • Ito, N., Kiyokazu Ujiie, Yasuhiro Nakashima (2017) An effect of direct communication on visitor’s perception after experience tour: a quantitative analysis of three different surveys by ex-ante, aftermath, and ex-post, Journal of Food System Research, 24(3), pp.167-172 (in Japanese).
  • Qi, D., T. Murakami, Y. Nakashima (2018) Recalculating the Agricultural Labor Force in China, China Economic Journal, 11(2), pp.151-169.