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Cover crops can generate both on-farm and water-quality benefits. However, their use in Iowa remains subdued, partly due to implementation costs faced by farmers. We tested the hypothesis that monetary incentives through cost-share programs are effective at increasing the area of farmland planted to cover crops in Iowa, as opposed to the alternative in which the participants of cost-share programs would have planted the same cover-crop acreage in the absence of payment. We found that cost-share payments induced a 15 percentage-point expansion in cover-crop acreage beyond what would have been planted in the absence of payment, among farmers who participated in cost-share programs. The estimated additionality rate was 54%, suggesting at least half of cost-share expenditures funded cover-crop acreage that would not have been planted without payment. Furthermore, we estimated the public cost to reduce nitrogen loads to Iowa waterways via cover crop, beyond what would have occurred in the absence of cost-share programs, to be$1.72–$ 4.70 lb −1 N ( $3.79–$ 10.36 kg −1 N). Farmers absorbed about 70% of those costs as private losses, and cost-share payments offset the remaining 30%. Although the additionality rate estimated in this study is less than what has been found in other states, the cost-share programs in Iowa have been relatively cost-effective, due to their lower payment rate.

We develop a theory of change for payments for environmental services (PES) to review their imminent strengths and weaknesses in light of a growing body of impact evaluation studies. We show that PES are probably at least as environmentally additional as other conservation tools, based on the limited evidence. The original vision of PES as being direct, flexible, and potentially effective remains valid, but PES design and implementation have to be upgraded in their economic functioning to better realize this potential. Adverse self-selection, inadequate administrative targeting, and ill-enforced conditionality constitute three key obstacles that may considerably hamper PES success. Policies such as spatial targeting to service density, threat and cost levels, and payment differentiation can alleviate the design challenges. PES site selection needs to further move into high-threat areas. Making adequate PES design choices also requires the political will to boost environmental effects.

Much of agricultural and agri-environmental policy is concerned with influencing the behavior of farmers in adopting new practices. An ability to understand and predict adoption of practices is useful for agricultural policy in several ways, including assessing additionality, selecting policy mechanisms, targeting policy to practices, farmer types or regions, and assessing likely policy success. Clear thinking about adoption is sometimes clouded by ambiguous and inconsistent language. We suggest a number of terms that are more specific than “adoption.” Research needs include collection of long-term data sets on adoption of a variety of practices, understanding what determines continuous, sustained adoption of conservation practices and a better understanding of why adoption varies between farms.

We investigate whether public support for innovation increases the propensity of SMEs in traditional manufacturing industries to cooperate for innovation—in particular, for incremental innovation—with other firms and external knowledge providers. Using data from seven EU regions, we find that support programmes do not promote cooperation with competitors, marginally promote cooperation with customers and suppliers and strongly promote cooperation with knowledge providers. These findings suggest that, in this case, the role of public policy is systems conforming rather than systems creating. Innovation support programmes can assist SMEs in traditional manufacturing industry to consolidate and/or extend their innovation ecosystems beyond familiar business partners by promoting cooperation with both private and public sector knowledge providers. Finally, our findings suggest that evaluation studies of innovation support programmes should be designed to capture not only input and/or output additionality but also behavioural and systemic effects.

The ocean is gaining prominence in climate change policy circles as a tool for addressing the climate crisis. Blue carbon, the carbon captured and stored by marine and coastal ecosystems and species, offers potential as a “nature-based solution” to climate change. The protection and restoration of specific ocean ecosystems can form part of a climate response within climate mitigation policies such as Nationally Determined Contributions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. For mitigation policies that seek to implement management actions that drawdown carbon, ecosystem sequestration and emissions must be measurable across temporal and spatial scales, and management must be practical leading to improved sequestration and avoided emissions. However, some blue carbon interventions may not be suitable as a climate mitigation response and better suited for other policy instruments such as those targeted toward biodiversity conservation. This paper gives context to numerous blue carbon sequestration pathways, quantifying their potential to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and comparing these sequestration pathways to point-source emissions reductions. The applicability of blue carbon is then discussed in terms of multiple international policy frameworks, to help individuals and institutions utilize the appropriate framework to reach ocean conservation and climate mitigation goals.

The main aim of the article is to examine how cooperation with research institutions influences technological maturity of enterprises. It is accompanied with the additional aim, which is to assess the role of innovation policy interventions in this process, as captured by the concept of behavioral additionality, which is one of the externalities of public support for R&D. The focus of this article is put on one of the specific types of behavioral additionality—cooperation additionality—which takes place in the situation where public support influences the collaboration behavior of a firm receiving R&D support. The study was conducted with the use of firm-level data collected in a survey on the sample of 464 enterprises operating within national smart specializations in Poland. The results of the research suggest that public funding fosters the cooperation between scientific institutions and enterprises, thus confirms the cooperation additionality.

The additionality of forest conservation interventions is frequently questioned. In particular, they are often considered to be located in places where forests are not threatened, which points to the existence of location biases. Revisiting this location bias concept, we conceptually distinguish potential and effective additionality and theoretically consider how the objectives of the implementer affect the siting choice of the forest conservation interventions and their additionality. Our theoretical intuition is that the choices of the implementers are influenced by the quality of institutions. Our results show that (1) the implementer's objective and local institutions may lead the implementer to select a site with low development potential and low forest threat, and (2) the selection of a site with low development potential, which is frequently presented as a location bias, does not necessarily preclude additionality.

  The study examines the Israeli Government Loans for SMEs in 2015. Our findings are based on three surveys. A business survey of 384 businesses that were granted a Government loan, a business survey of 99 businesses that were granted loans but decided not to take them and a survey of 50 loan consultants who advised those businesses about their eligibility and the Terms and Conditions of the loans. We tested Loan Adjusted Additionality and Loan Baseline Additionality and found that 53% of loans taken from the Government Loans Foundation (GLF) are additional loans. SMEs would not have taken a loan, or any part of one, if not for the Government Loans Foundation Scheme. Our contribution to the literature is by including Indirect Additionality, demonstrating the importance of the GLF Scheme, not only by assisting SMEs in their financial planning and growth but also, by signalling early stage business resilience, reducing the risks for commercial banks through regulated, financial due diligence. This outcome expands the pool of SMEs which have access to free market loans and has the potential to improve their survival rate, thus fostering economic growth.

We examine how persistent firms' participation is in R&D subsidy and tax incentive programs, and whether persistence is driven by individual heterogeneity—observed and unobserved—or by state dependence. Using a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms over the period 2001–2008, we estimate a set of dynamic models of program participation. True state dependence of participation in each program is found to be significant, while unobserved heterogeneity accounts for about 41 and 29 % of observed persistence in subsidy and tax credit programs, respectively. Both tend to reach mostly stable R&D performers. We also identify significant differences across programs. Highly productive firms within a given industry are more likely to obtain subsidies; the use of tax credits, in contrast, is unrelated to a firm's productivity. Our results suggest that R&D tax incentives and R&D subsidies are not substitutes and that any unintended misallocation of support is likely to persist.

This paper examines the effectiveness of government subsidies in fostering innovation among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with a particular focus on additionality, crowding-out, and cherry-picking effects. Using the latest national survey data on Chinese high-tech SMEs, we apply robust econometric techniques—including the Heckman selection model, structural equation modeling (SEM), and propensity score matching (PSM)—to address potential selection bias and endogeneity. Our findings reveal that government subsidies positively influence both innovation inputs and outputs, suggesting a predominant additionality effect rather than a crowding-out effect, at least within high-tech SMEs. However, subsidies do not appear to alleviate the financial constraints faced by most SMEs, indicating that they are insufficient as a standalone solution to financing challenges. Furthermore, state ownership enhances input additionality but does not significantly impact output additionality. We also find evidence of cherry-picking in subsidy allocation, with loans exhibiting stronger additionality effects on innovation compared to grants and tax credits, which are more prone to selective intervention. These findings highlight the need for more targeted subsidy policies that prioritize financially constrained firms with high innovation potential while mitigating government selectivity. Our study offers valuable insights for policymakers seeking to design more effective innovation support mechanisms for high-tech SMEs.