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...

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...

At the beginning of the transition, the economic decline of agriculture partially relaxed the pressure on the wildlife. However, the policy continued to concentrate on regulating the intensity of production rather then creating incentives to produce environmental qualities. The structural...

The paper focuses on changes in property rights and policies regarding interactions between agriculture and nature in the Czech Republic. In the first part the recent situation is reviewed. The institutional and organisational features and their development during the transition and recent years...

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...