Do you think the nascent field of economics of animal welfare will play a significant role in increasing the spending on animal welfare interventions? To illustrate what I am referring to, I share below the abstracts of 2 pieces of research in that field.
Animal agriculture encompasses global markets with large externalities from animal welfare and greenhouse gas emissions. We formally study these social costs by embedding an animal inclusive social welfare function into a climate-economy model that includes an agricultural sector. The total external costs are found to be large under the baseline parameterization. These results are driven by animal welfare costs, which themselves are due to an assumption that animal lives are worse than nonexistence. Though untestable—and perhaps controversial—we find support for this qualitative assumption and demonstrate that our results are robust to a wide range of its quantitative interpretations. Surprisingly, the environmental costs play a comparatively small role, even in sensitivity analyses that depart substantially from our baseline case. For the model to find that beef, a climate-intensive product, has a larger total externality than poultry, an animal-intensive product, we must simultaneously reduce the animal welfare externality to 1% of its baseline level and increase climate damages roughly 35-fold. Correspondingly, the model implies both that the animal agriculture sector is much larger than its optimal level and that considerations across products ought to be dominated by animal welfare, rather than climate, effects.
I propose a framework to evaluate the social gains from policies regarding animals. The model considers both the welfare of animals and humans. The gains in animal welfare are estimated by considering the violations of the animals’ fundamental freedoms weighted for each species. I apply this framework to twenty policy proposals targeting wild, domestic, farmed, and laboratory animals. Although the policies benefit from widespread popular support in France (the annual willingnesses-to-pay range between 15 and 39 Euros per person per year), I show that they have very heterogeneous impacts on animal welfare (valued at between 0.013 and 3618 Euros per person per year). I further show that humans’ willingness-to-pay for policies improving animal welfare is a poor predictor of the effective impact on animal welfare of these policies. I conclude that it is essential to value animal welfare per se in cost-benefit analyses in order to determine the set of welfare-increasing policies.
I’m excited about the growing field of the economics of animal welfare, including research papers like the two you mentioned. I’m not sure the field will play a significant role in increasing the spending on animal welfare interventions (though curious to hear how you see that happening). But I see a number of important other roles it can play:
Influencing public policy, by allowing the integrating of animal welfare benefits into cost-benefit analysis. I’ve seen a number of animal welfare regulatory proposals be stopped in part because regulators assigned zero value to the animal welfare benefits.
Influencing effective advocacy. I think experiments, like those done at college dining halls on the meat consumption impacts of lectures and leafletting, can lead us toward more cost-effective interventions.
Influencing the rest of academia. For example, my sense is that fields like environmental economics currently often exclude animal welfare from their considerations, leading to conclusions that can help the environment but harm animal welfare.
Do you think the nascent field of economics of animal welfare will play a significant role in increasing the spending on animal welfare interventions? To illustrate what I am referring to, I share below the abstracts of 2 pieces of research in that field.
Kevin Kuruc’s paper Monetizing the externalities of animal agriculture: insights from an inclusive welfare function (2023):
Romain Espinosa’s Animals and social welfare (2023):
I’m excited about the growing field of the economics of animal welfare, including research papers like the two you mentioned. I’m not sure the field will play a significant role in increasing the spending on animal welfare interventions (though curious to hear how you see that happening). But I see a number of important other roles it can play:
Influencing public policy, by allowing the integrating of animal welfare benefits into cost-benefit analysis. I’ve seen a number of animal welfare regulatory proposals be stopped in part because regulators assigned zero value to the animal welfare benefits.
Influencing effective advocacy. I think experiments, like those done at college dining halls on the meat consumption impacts of lectures and leafletting, can lead us toward more cost-effective interventions.
Influencing the rest of academia. For example, my sense is that fields like environmental economics currently often exclude animal welfare from their considerations, leading to conclusions that can help the environment but harm animal welfare.