The management of water resources is today one of the main issues in most countries. In Italy, as in many other European countries, irrigation is the main sector using water and hence it is at the centre of the water policy agenda. Water management for irrigation requires suitable policy tools...

The European Agri-Environmental Measures (AEMs) have a relevant role in encouraging a sustainable resources use and developing environmentally-friendly farming practices. AEMs account for more than half of the rural development budget of the Common Agriculture Policy. However, despite their...

The main objective of the paper is to inquiry if the Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES’s) included in the Rural Development Plan in Emilia Romagna have played a role in enhancing the Nature Value of regional farmland. High Nature Value (HNV) farmland is a concept that aims to identify the...

A large body of literature has highlighted and analysed the issues which affect the quality and the reliability of evaluation results of the RDPs measure. In addition to weaknesses in the specification of objectives, measurement of the additionality, several authors have pointed-out a lack in...

This paper identifies information that may be important in determining the benefits of preventing toxic water contamination (or equivalently cost of nonaction) when a given toxification occurs. It attempts to identify information and behavior issues that need to be considered when we estimate...

Despite a large literature about energy production from renewable resources, the specific interplay between farm characteristics, market, local regulation and the CAP in the adoption of energy-related technologies by farmers is still poorly studied. This paper aims at analyzing the farmers’...

This paper outlines DEBET (Decision Based Economic Theory), a method for determining revealed preferences of governments. DEBET is applied to US wheat policy decisions in the 1980s. This method has a number of advantages over alternative approaches to the analysis of revealed preferences of...

Decision based economic theory stresses the central position of the objective function in the behavior of economic agents. Insufficient knowledge of objective functions hampers the development of economic theory. In this article, a methodology for deriving objective functions from conscious...

In the last decades, problems related to environmental protection have become more and more important, involving a growing number of economic and social actors. The new role played by agriculture in this context requires not only innovations concerning policy instruments, but also an evolution...