IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/apecpp/v46y2024i3p1214-1240.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An evaluation of Congressional Budget Office's baseline projections of USDA mandatory farm and nutrition programs

Author

Listed:
  • Hari P. Regmi
  • Todd H. Kuethe

Abstract

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections of USDA's mandatory farm and nutrition program outlays are important in shaping US agricultural policy. Using CBO projections and observed outcomes from 1985 through 2020, we examine the degree to which projections of farm, supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), and child nutrition program outlays are unbiased, efficient, and informative. We find that projections for farm and child nutrition program outlays are unbiased, SNAP outlays are unbiased at short‐term but are downward biased beyond a 3‐year horizon. All three series of projections are inefficient. SNAP and child nutrition program outlay projections are informative up to a 5‐year horizon, but the farm program outlay projections are informative for only a 1‐year horizon. Disaggregated farm program data since 2008 suggests that the uninformativeness principally stems from conservation and commodity program projections. The findings may be valuable to CBO, as they continue to improve projections, and to projection users, in adjusting their expectations.

Suggested Citation

  • Hari P. Regmi & Todd H. Kuethe, 2024. "An evaluation of Congressional Budget Office's baseline projections of USDA mandatory farm and nutrition programs," Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 46(3), pages 1214-1240, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:apecpp:v:46:y:2024:i:3:p:1214-1240
    DOI: 10.1002/aepp.13457
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13457
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/aepp.13457?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:apecpp:v:46:y:2024:i:3:p:1214-1240. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)2040-5804 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.