Auctions are a potentially suitable policy tool for increasing the efficiency of Agri- Environmental Schemes (AES) through an improved allocation of contracts. In theory, through the auction mechanism, farmers have incentives to reveal their compliance costs, helping to reduce information rents...

The objective of the paper is to evaluate the sustainability of irrigated agriculture under Water Framework Directive (60/2000) and Agenda 2000. The methodology relies on scenario analysis combined to farm level multicriteria mathematical programming. The methodology is applied to the case study...

Cooperative and corporate farms have retained an important role for agricultural production in many transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Despite this importance, their ownership structure and particularly the ownership's effect on their investment activity vital for efficient...

The ecosystem and the economic subsystem are interlinked. In fact, it is the overconsumption of scarce resources or the overproduction of bad outputs at economic system level that causes a great part of the imbalances at the ecosystem level. Some imbalances do not originate at the economic...

There is a lack of knowledge about the effectiveness and efficiency of soil conservation policies in agriculture and little understanding of how policy measures should be designed to encourage farmers to adopt soil conservation practices. This paper analyzes institutional settings surrounding...

The objective of the study was to assess the farm level economic implications of value-adding genetic selection strategies to improve milk fat composition. Selection based on a quantitative trait (ratio of total saturated to total unsaturated fatty acids in milk) or a known genotype (for the...

Pine wood nematode, B. xylophilus poses a serious threat for the European forest industry. This study applies a quantitative risk assessment to analyze the risk of pine wood nematode in the EU, by estimating the reduction expected within forestry stock available for wood supply and its...

This paper uses a micro-econometric model to analyse differences in variable profits and economic behaviour between organic and conventional arable farms. Insight in factors underlying these differences is essential in designing policy measures that aim at encouraging the transition to a more...