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 study provides an empirical assessment of the competitiveness of Albanian dairy and wine production, based on specifically collected survey data. For both product groups, the analysis is carried out on two levels: farm level production of raw material and processing and manufacturing of the...

This paper is concerned with agri-environmental policy in Germany and focuses in particular on soil and water conservation. At first it discusses to what extent agriculture contributes to erosion and the pollution of surface waters and groundwater with nutrients and pesticides. Whereas erosion...

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...

Social capital is defined as the shared knowledge, trust, and culture, embodied in the structural forms of networks and other stable inter-agent relationships. Social capital has been shown to be more difficult to build than economic capital, and to have greater beneficial effects for community...