Cultured Meat: Promises and Challenges.

Cultured meat involves producing meat from animal cells, not from slaughtered animals. This innovation has the potential to revolutionize the meat industry, with wide implications for the environment, health and animal welfare. The main purpose of this paper is to stimulate some economic research on cultured meat. In particular, this paper includes a prospective discussion on the demand and supply of cultured meat. It also discusses some early results on the environmental impacts of cultured meat, emphasizing the promises (e.g., regarding the reduction in land use) but also the uncertainties. It then argues that cultured meat is a moral improvement compared to conventional meat. Finally, it discusses some regulatory issues, and the need for more public support to the innovation.

Fair innings? The utilitarian and prioritarian value of risk reduction over a whole lifetime.

The social value of risk reduction (SVRR) is the marginal social value of reducing an individual's fatality risk, as measured by some social welfare function (SWF). This Article investigates SVRR, using a lifetime utility model in which individuals are differentiated by age, lifetime income profile, and lifetime risk profile. We consider both the utilitarian SWF and a "prioritarian" SWF, which applies a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation to individual utility. We show that the prioritarian SVRR provides a rigorous basis in economic theory for the "fair innings" concept, proposed in the public health literature: as between an older individual and a similarly situated younger individual (one with the same income and risk profile), a risk reduction for the younger individual is accorded greater social weight even if the gains to expected lifetime utility are equal. The comparative statics of prioritarian and utilitarian SVRRs with respect to age, and to (past, present, and future) income and baseline survival probability, are significantly different from the conventional value per statistical life (VSL). Our empirical simulation based upon the U.S. population survival curve and income distribution shows that prioritarian SVRRs with a moderate degree of concavity in the transformation function conform to widely held views regarding lifesaving policies: the young should take priority but income should make no difference.

Infectious Diseases and Meat Production.

Most infectious diseases in humans originate from animals. In this paper, we explore the role of animal farming and meat consumption in the emergence and amplification of infectious diseases. First, we discuss how meat production increases epidemic risks, either directly through increased contact with wild and farmed animals or indirectly through its impact on the environment (e.g., biodiversity loss, water use, climate change). Traditional food systems such as bushmeat and backyard farming increase the risks of disease transmission from wild animals, while intensive farming amplifies the impact of the disease due to the high density, genetic proximity, increased immunodeficiency, and live transport of farmed animals. Second, we describe the various direct and indirect costs of animal-based infectious diseases, and in particular, how these diseases can negatively impact the economy and the environment. Last, we discuss policies to reduce the social costs of infectious diseases. While existing regulatory frameworks such as the "One Health" approach focus on increasing farms' biosecurity and emergency preparedness, we emphasize the need to better align stakeholders' incentives and to reduce meat consumption. We discuss in particular the implementation of a "zoonotic" Pigouvian tax, and innovations such as insect-based food or cultured meat.

Public and private incentives for self-protection.

Governments sometimes encourage or impose individual self-protection measures, such as wearing a protective mask in public during an epidemic. However, by reducing the risk of being infected by others, more self-protection may lead each individual to go outside the house more often. In the absence of lockdown, this creates a "collective offsetting effect", since more people outside means that the risk of infection is increased for all. However, wearing masks also creates a positive externality on others, by reducing the risk of infecting them. We show how to integrate these different effects in a simple model, and we discuss when self-protection efforts should be encouraged (or deterred) by a social planner.

Immediate and 15-Week Correlates of Individual Commitment to a "Green Monday" National Campaign Fostering Weekly Substitution of Meat and Fish by Other Nutrients.

Promoting healthier and more sustainable diets by decreasing meat consumption represents a significant challenge in the Anthropocene epoch. However, data are scarce regarding the effects of nationwide meat reduction campaigns. We described and analyzed the correlates of a national campaign in France (called "Green Monday", GM) promoting the weekly substitution of meat and fish by other nutrients. Two cross-sectional online surveys were compared: a National Comparison sample (NC) of the French general population and a self-selected sample of participants who registered for the Green Monday campaign. A follow-up study was carried out in the GM sample, in which participants were asked during 15 weeks whether or not they had substituted meat and fish. There were 2005 participants aged 18-95 (47.7% females) in the NC sample and 24,507 participants aged 18-95 (77.5% females) in the GM sample. One month after the beginning of the campaign, 51.2% of the respondents reported they had heard about Green Monday in the NC sample, and 10.5% indicated they had already started to apply Green Monday. Logistic regression analysis showed that compared to the NC sample, participants belonging to the GM sample displayed a higher rate of females, Odds Ratio (OR) = 4.26, 95% Confidence Interval (CI): 3.86-4.71, were more educated, OR = 1.32, 95% CI: 1.28-1.36, had higher self-rated affluence, OR = 1.50, 95% CI: 1.42-1.58 and the size of their vegetarian network was greater, OR = 1.50, 95% CI: 1.41-1.58. They reported a slightly higher frequency of meat consumption, OR = 1.05, 95% CI: 1.01-1.10, while their frequency of fish consumption was lower, OR = 0.81, 95% CI: 0.76-0.87. Finally, the personality dimension Openness was more strongly endorsed by participants in the GM sample, OR = 1.79, 95% CI: 1.65-1.93. A multiple regression analysis indicated that Openness also predicted the number of participation weeks in the GM Sample (beta = 0.03, p < 0.009). In conclusion, specific demographic and personality profiles were more responsive to the national campaign, which could inform and help to shape future actions aiming at changing food habits.

Pesticides and health: a review of evidence on health effects, valuation of risks, and benefit-cost analysis.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: This study presents literature reviews for the period 2000-2013 on (i) the health effects of pesticides and on (ii) preference valuation of health risks related to pesticides, as well as a discussion of the role of benefit-cost analysis applied to pesticide regulatory measures. FINDINGS: This study indicates that the health literature has focused on individuals with direct exposure to pesticides, i.e. farmers, while the literature on preference valuation has focused on those with indirect exposure, i.e. consumers. The discussion highlights the need to clarify the rationale for regulating pesticides, the role of risk perceptions in benefit-cost analysis, and the importance of inter-disciplinary research in this area. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This study relates findings of different disciplines (health, economics, public policy) regarding pesticides, and identifies gaps for future research.

The social value of mortality risk reduction: VSL versus the social welfare function approach.

We examine how different welfarist frameworks evaluate the social value of mortality risk reduction. These frameworks include classical, distributively unweighted cost-benefit analysis--i.e., the "value per statistical life" (VSL) approach-and various social welfare functions (SWFs). The SWFs are either utilitarian or prioritarian, applied to policy choice under risk in either an "ex post" or "ex ante" manner. We examine the conditions on individual utility and on the SWF under which these frameworks display sensitivity to wealth and to baseline risk. Moreover, we discuss whether these frameworks satisfy related properties that have received some attention in the literature, namely equal value of risk reduction, preference for risk equity, and catastrophe aversion. We show that the particular manner in which VSL ranks risk-reduction measures is not necessarily shared by other welfarist frameworks.