| The intent of this study is to address the various impacts---both negative and positive---of federal regulatory pesticide policies on America's overall level of agriculture productivity, with the outcome variable being the growth in overall agriculture output. As a measure of health, the level of growth that the farm sector experiences regarding aggregate output from the contiguous 48 states will be the indicator. Methodologically, this study will control for various agricultural and environmental inputs over a time-series at both the disaggregated and aggregate level. The data will be regressed by state and nation, by year, and then by periods of time before and after landmark federal legislation governing chemical pesticides.;The findings of this thesis show that chemical pesticide consumption growth patterns increased, stabilized, and then slightly decreased throughout the 1960--2004 time period: increasing after the passage of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Acts of 1972 and 1988, and then decreasing slightly following the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996. The findings also show that agriculture production growth steadily increased, even as regulatory policies periodically increased in stringency. As an explanatory conclusion, these enacted regulatory policies allowed for the necessary use of chemical alternatives even as they eliminated certain chemicals from American farmers' pesticide choice set. |
