Browsing by Author "Ankamah-Yeboah, I."

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Assessing public preferences for deep sea ecosystem conservation: a choice experiment in Norway and Scotland
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2021) Ankamah-Yeboah, I.; Armstrong, C.W.; Hynes, S.; Xuan, B.B.; Simpson, K.
Recent events around the world have revealed varying degrees of public support for climate change and environmental regulation. Applying a latent class logit model, this study investigates Norwegian and Scottish public’s economic support for proposed deep sea management policies for novel attributes, identifying the presence of preference heterogeneity. Marine litter and health of fish stocks were the attributes with the highest values in absolute terms. This was followed by the size of the protected area coverage, whilst the creation of jobs was the least valued. The results highlight public support for the further collective action required by the EU in moving beyond the 2020 objective of achieving good environmental status of Europe’s seas, despite the low WTP values of the minority classes in each country
Capital structure and firm performance: Agency theory application to Mediterranean aquaculture firms
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2021) Ankamah-Yeboah, I.; Nielsen, R.; Llorente, I.
The study uses firm level panel data to determine performance-leverage relationships among Mediterranean aquaculture production firms in Croatia, Italy, Spain, France and Greece. A stochastic frontier production function is used to determine and define performance through firm level efficiency estimates. The multilevel internal instrument variable approach is employed to identify the causal relationships between performance and leverage. Our results show that technical efficiency has been increasing across all firms over the period 2008–2016. The agency-cost hypothesis holds such that lever age has an inverted U-shaped relationship with performance. This implies that leverage increases with efficiency, but efficiency begins to decrease at sufficiently higher levels of lever age. The reverse relationship confirms the franchise-value hypothesis, which states that firms with high efficiency will try to protect the value of their high income by holding more equity capital. Implications for the results are drawn for the Mediterranean region.
Consumer Preference Heterogeneity and Preference Segmentation: The Case of Ecolabeled Salmon in Danish Retail Sales
(Marine Resource Economics, 2020) Ankamah-Yeboah, I.; Asche, F.; Bronnmann, J.; et al.
The popularity of sustainably produced food products has grown rapidly in recent years. Ecolabels are used to indicate the environmental sustainability of products and have been implemented in the seafood market, with the leading ecolabel being that of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) for wild fish. However, the effect of ecolabels on consumer decision-making remains unclear regarding actual purchasing behavior. This study analyzes scanner data from a household panel in Denmark, accounting for consumer heterogeneity using random parameters and latent class logit models to identify the effect of ecolabels. The results indicate substantial consumer preference heterogeneity concerning important salmon attributes. Salmon attributes that confer convenience to household fish consumption appear to be very important in consumer choices. Ecolabeling has a significant effect on household decision-making, but the majority of consumers are more likely to choose non-labeled products, which may be due to the low availability of eco-labeled products. Five consumer segments are identified, revealing one consumer segment with a preference for organic labeled salmon, comprising 15% of households. However, a consumer segment for MSC-labeled salmon is not identified. The implication is that management can rely on a segment of consumers to implement organic principles in salmon farming, but the preference for sustainable salmon fishing is inconclusive due to uncertain confounding effects.
Exploring Perspectives of the Validity, Legitimacy and Acceptability of Environmental Valuation using Q Methodology
(Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economics, 2021) Ankamah-Yeboah, I.; Armstrong, C.; Tinch, R.
There is increasing interest from research providers, policymakers, and private sector decision-makers in using the economic valuation of ecosystem goods and services to improve decision-making (Austen et al., 2019). Market systems and economic appraisal methods offer powerful tools for supporting decisions about allocating scarce resources (Tinch et al., 2019). However, there are many Important aspects of human activity that are not fully reflected in market prices. These include our impacts on the natural world and our dependence on the many valuable goods and services ecosystems provide. Assessing the values of these impacts, goods, and services in monetary terms, combined with various economic analysis and appraisal tools, could help environmental management.
Have environmental preferences and willingness to pay remained stable before and during the global Covid-19 shock?
(Ecological Economics, 2021) Hynes, S.; Xuan, B.B.; Ankamah-Yeboah, I.; Simpson, K.; Armstrong, C.W.; Tinch, R.; Ressurreiç˜ao, A.
This study tests the stability of environmental preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) values using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) across three countries pre and post the peak of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. A DCE examining the public’s preferences for alternative environmental management plans on the high seas, in the area of the Flemish Cap, was carried out in Canada, Scotland and Norway in late 2019 and was rerun in early May 2020 shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic had officially peaked in the three countries. The same choice set sequence is tested across the two periods, using different but nationally representative samples in each case. Entropy balancing, a multivariate reweighting method, is used to achieve covariate balance between the pre and post Covid samples in the analysis. The results suggest that both preferences and WTP remain relatively stable in the face of a major public health crisis and economic upheaval.
Market Integration between Cultured and Captured Species in Developing Countries: Lessons from Inland Areas in Bangladesh
(2021) Hossain, A.; Ankamah-Yeboah, I.; Huda, F.A.; Badiuzzaman; Nielsen, M.
The study tested market integration between cultured fish (tilapia and pangasius) against captured fish (hilsa, swamp barb, prawn, wallago, and long-whiskered catfish) in the domestic market of Bangladesh. The Johansen cointegration framework was applied to identify market integration between cultured and captured species using monthly wholesale price data for the period January 2010 to May 2017. The study showed that the law of one price was rejected in all market pairs except the pangasius and long-whiskered catfish pair, suggesting imperfectly integrated markets. The study revealed mixed evidence of weak exogeneity tests, including cul tured and captured led markets as well as bidirectional relationships. Given the fact that cultured fish accounts for a substantial market share, the implication is that the supply growth of aquaculture, all other things being equal, reduces captured fish prices and, subsequently, reduces overexploitation, overcapacity, and the number of fishers in a situation where overexploitation is prevalent. This appears to lead to a double gain in the long run, with fish farmers producing and fishers catching more fish.
Price transmission in the pangasius value chain from Vietnam to Germany
(Aquaculture Reports, 2019-12-31) Ankamah-Yeboah, I.; Thong, N.T.; Bronnmann, J.; Nielsen, M.; Roth, E.; Schulze-Ehlers, B.
Evidence of market integration between farmed pangasius and wild-caught whitefish is provided in the literature, pointing towards pangasius prices being determined on the large international whitefish market. In the presence of price transmission in the value chain, global growth of pangasius farming does therefore not in itself reduce the farm-gate prices in Vietnam. In this paper, price transmission in the pangasius value chain from farmers in Vietnam, via export to final consumption in Germany, is tested using the Johansen cointegration framework. Price transmission is identified both between farm-gate prices and export prices in Vietnam and between export prices and retail prices in Germany. The Law of One Price was rejected in both cases, indicating imperfect price transmission. Weak exogeneity tests of market leadership identify a value chain with downstream market leadership consisting of German retailers leading exporters, which themselves lead farmers. The implication is that growth of Vietnamese pangasius farming can continue, ceteris paribus, without reducing prices substantially. Vietnamese farmers can invest in expansions without fearing self-inflicted price falls, but farmers and local communities remain prone to fluctuations following from supply and demand changes at the international whitefish market outside of their control.
Technical efficiency and environmental impact of seabream and seabass farms
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2021) Nielsen, R.; Ankamah-Yeboah, I.; Llorente, I.
Sea cage farming of seabream and seabass is the most important form of aquaculture production in the Mediterranean Sea. Despite the continuous global growth in aquaculture production and demand, the economic performance of seabream and seabass companies has not followed the same trend. In recent years, companies have faced successive periods of market instability, with high volatility in supply and market prices that have strongly affected their operational margins. Despite the regional importance of this industry, only a handful of studies have examined the economic performance of these farms. In this paper, we investigate the technical efficiency and scale effects of Mediterranean aquaculture farms. Furthermore, environmental impact in terms of nutrient emissions from the farms is examined and discussed. Technical efficiency effects are analyzed using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and the bootstrap procedure is used for bias correction. The results show that the mean technical efficiency could be improved by between 16% and 34%, and scale efficiency suggests that farms could improve their efficiency by operating at an optimal scale. Compared to measurements in previous studies, the environmental variables show that the emission of nutrients from the farms per kilo of fish produced has not changed over the past twenty years. Finally, policy implications suggest that more attention toward improving technical efficiency may help improve the robustness of the sector and that environmental regulation might be needed in order to improve the environmental performance of farms