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...

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...

Although good and timely information on agricultural production is critical for policy-decisions, the quality of underlying data is often low and improving data quality could have a high payoff. This paper uses data from a production diary, administered concurrently with a standard household...

This paper revisits the role of land measurement error in the inverse farm size and productivity relationship. By making use of data from a nationally representative household survey from Uganda, in which self-reported land size information is complemented by plot measurements collected using...

The Boserup-Ruthenberg framework has long been used to explain and understand the determinants of agricultural growth, the nature of the intensification of farming systems, investment, and technology adoption. The literature has produced an extensive body of evidence that summarizes or tests the...

Land area is a fundamental component of agricultural statistics, and of analyses undertaken by agricultural economists. While household surveys in developing countries have traditionally relied on farmers'own, potentially error-prone, land area assessments, the availability of affordable and...

Albania's radical farmland distribution is credited with averting an economic crisis and social unrest during the transition. But many believe it led to a holding structure too fragmented to be efficient, and that public efforts to consolidate plots are needed to lay the foundation for greater...