One of the new political instruments of the European Common Agricultural Policy-reform is the crop diversification measure. To comply with this measure, arable farmers will have to grow a minimum number of crops on their land, in given proportions. In this paper a non-parametric simulation model...

We apply a spatial price equilibrium model of the world sugar market to simulate an abolishment of the EU quota system in 2015/16. To overcome the normative nature of the approach, we calibrate the model by attaching a non-linear cost term to each trade flow. This is in some regards similar to...

The paper analyses the governance choices in production quota with the Flemish nutrient production rights as a case. A static model of quota trade in the short run shows the inefficiency of discrete non-auctioned trade with fixed transaction costs. This model also shows that an obligation to...

Current thoughts on CAP changes, e.g. the "Health Check", emphasize the necessity to move away from payments based on historical receipts towards a "flatter rate" system. The aim of current research is to simulate the impact of a flat rate system (equal payments per hectare of cultivated land)...

In Flanders glasshouse vegetables and ornamental plants are typically produced at family businesses. At this type of businesses the objectives and long-term firm developments are influenced by the so called ‘family-firm life cycle’. In many cases the firm shows a life cycle that corresponds...

Regional development is receiving a lot of attention nowadays in European policy. A possible stepping stone to achieve regional development is regional identity. This paper investigates whether regional identity can contribute to the specific case of agricultural regional development. One...

The preparation of the farm transfer or farm exit is a process that starts in the consolidation stage of the farm life cycle. In this stage, the decision to transfer the farm or not is taken and the farm management is adapted to this decision. The objective of this paper is to model the...

A farm model is developed for simulating the potential income change resulting from conversion to organic farming. The model uses conventional farm data, taken from the Belgian FADN. Given the normative character of the model, and the impossibility of calibration to historical conversion...

One of the common strategies in rural development programmes is to support the adoption of new on-farm activities. The rationale behind this is that farm diversification is a way to assure an appropriate level of income for the farmers. Through interviews with 49 relatively small farmers, the...

All deviations from the frontier is inefficiency in deterministic DEA (DDEA); thus making the DDEA unable to accommodate the measurement and specification errors. But, most of the production relationships are stochastic in nature with some inputs fixed in the short run. This paper addressed the...