| Animal epidemics,especially serious animal epidemics,severely affect industrial development,ecological environment,market stability,food safety,and even threaten human health.The farmers are the first line of animal epidemic prevention and control,so it is of great practical significance to regulate and incent farmers to prevent and control animal epidemics better.The externality of animal disease requires public policy interventions,China’s epidemic prevention and control policies have been continuously strengthened and improved in recent years.But the current large number of farmers in China and limited regulatory resources leading to public health events caused by farmers’ behavior are still common,Such as discarding and selling sick animals,to conceal the epidemic and so on.Serious information asymmetry reduces regulatory policy efficiency,and prevention and control compensation as an incentive tool does not seem to play a corresponding role.Therefore,this paper raises the question: why the policy cannot regulate and encourage farmers to control animal diseases effectively? This paper is based on this issue.To analyze the effect of the policy‘s regulation and incentive,we should shed light on the farmers‘ decision-making mechanism of epidemic prevention and control firstly.This paper divides the decision-making mechanism of epidemic prevention and control into prior prevention and post control.According to the disease types,animal epidemics are divided into general ones and major ones.Under the different stages and disease types,different farmers have different decision-making mechanism.Based on the results,the paper analyzes the effect of the policy regulating and simulating on the farmers‘ behavior of animal epidemic prevention.Furthermore,the optimal policy mix is analyzed from the government point of view,with the maximization conditions of the farmers as the incentive compatibility constraints.According to this research idea,this paper firstly analyzes the farmer‘ decision-making mechanism of epidemic prevention behavior,and conducted the empirical test with the investigation data of poultry farmers in Guangdong province.Then,under the assumption of information asymmetry,the paper analyzes the regulation and incentive of the policy,also the optimal policy combination with different policy objectives,then the numerical simulation method is used to verify it.The main conclusions of this paper can be summarized as follows:Under the assumption of maximizing the utility of the farmer,the theoretical deduction results show as follows.Firstly,in the case of non-major animal epidemic situation,the farmer make the decision of epidemic prevention measures according to the expectation of the prevention measures minimizing losses before the outbreak of epidemic.It also finds that there are alternative and complementary relationships between different epidemic prevention factors.Treatment of dead poultry after the onset of the disease depends on the cost of harmless treatment,government regulation and the sale profits of dead poultry.Secondly,in the case of major animal disease,farmers first decide whether to report the epidemic,which depends on the level of culling compensation,supervision and punishment,illegal sales proceeds.Then the farmer determines the degree of input of the epidemic prevention factor.In the case of selecting the reported epidemic situation,the optimal dosage of the epidemic prevention factor depends on the compensation level,and the compensation will,to a certain extent,replace the factor inputs of the farmers.If the disease is not reported,the optimal factor input of the farmer is positively related to the degree of supervision and punishment,and is negatively related to the sale proceeds.Thirdly,in the case of information asymmetry,the government can adjust the compensation,supervision and punishment measures to change the boundaries of farmers reporting epidemics,encourage farmers to expose the situation.And government could encourage farmers to optimize the level of epidemic prevention factors by adjusting the degree of compensation,but farmers must bear a certain degree of risk of disease loss.The empirical analysis results of the farmers‘ decision-making of the pre-epidemic prevention factors show that,firstly,the cost and measures of the epidemic prevention measures have different effects on the prevention factors.The vaccine cost and the labor cost have a significant negative impact on the factors input,but the vaccine benefits and labor benefits have no significant impact on inputs.The benefits of farming norms have a significant positive impact on the implementation of normative measures.Secondly,to the prevention of HPAI,the intensity of supervision significantly increased the number of poultry avian influenza vaccine investment.Forced culling policy will increase the number of farmers vaccinated,but the compensation policy has not significantly increased the use of avian influenza vaccines.The testing of poultry at the time of sale also increases the use of vaccines,as this reduces the likelihood of illegal sale.The results show that the current mandatory policy is still the main policy factors affecting the prevention of avian influenza in farmers,and the economic incentive policy does not play a role.In addition,the paper considered the higher the risk of HPAI loss,the more frequent use of avian influenza vaccine,but vaccine costs and benefits have no significant impact on the number of vaccine inputs.The empirical analysis results of the farmers‘ decision-making of post-epidemic prevention show that,firstly,in the general epidemic situation,the supervision of poultry sales significantly affected the farmer‘s treatment of poultry,but other policy factors have no significant impact.The control factors such as the awareness of poultry‘ damage,contract farming,decentralized households,and so on,have a significant impact on the treatment of dead poultry.Secondly,under the HPAI epidemic situation,the culling compensation policy awareness and the punishment intensity of illegal poultry have positive significantly impact on the epidemic report decision,but variable of illegal sales proceeds is not significant.The higher the cost of harmless processing(unreported opportunity cost),the farmers would be more likely to report the epidemic.In addition,regulatory and penalizing policies can significantly affect farmers‘ willingness to cooperate with avian flu culling and safely treatment of affected poultry.In the post-prevention and control decision-making,the regulation policy has a wide impact on the farmers‘ decision-making,and the compensation policy only affects the decision-making of the epidemic report.The numerical model results of the policy control and incentive find that,firstly,The current avian flu prevention and control policy does not meet the effect of encouraging farmers to report the outbreak and put enough factors into the epidemic,nor does it achieve the optimal policy mix under the cost minimization or welfare maximization policy objectives.Secondly,based on the current model and parameters,under the restriction of epidemic prevention technology,there is a feasible range of compensation,supervision and punishment for encouraging the farmers to report the epidemic and put the maximum amount of epidemic prevention factors.The compensation has a greater impact on the factors with farmers of high risk hedging.Thirdly,if the government’s disease management goal is to minimize the social cost,the best policy combination are including high penalty,high supervision and low compensation,thus reducing the loss of regulatory resources caused by the information asymmetry.If the government management goal is to maximize the social welfare,the optimal degree of supervision is zero,the degree of punishment has no effect,and the compensation level needs to be higher than the point of the reporting boundary and lower than the point of epidemic prevention factor.The critical point which is smaller for farmers with lower risk aversion.Under the welfare maximization target,high compensation and low regulatory policy mix is more appropriate,and the loss of resources caused by asymmetric information would be low.In addition,the social cost under the cost minimization target is less than the social cost under the goal of maximizing the benefits,so the government has incentives to implement a cost-minimized policy mix. |
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