In many developing countries, regional integration has become a key means of promoting economic growth and fighting poverty. PTAs are increasingly used as engines of change in many developing countries, to promote, implement, and lock in reforms in a wide range of policy areas such as investment...

One of the goals of geographical indications in the EU is to contribute to rural development of remote and less-favoured areas. On the base of a rough estimation of the uptake of geographical indications in mountain and island areas of the EU, it can be concluded that indeed agricultural and...

We analyse weekly calf prices from 2003 to 2009 to assess the impact of two important events which changed the structure of European cattle markets. We find the four European calf markets studied to be integrated. The decoupling of farm payments in the framework of the 2003 reforms of the Common...

This paper investigates the impact of labour force composition on productivity in EU arable farming. We test the heterogeneity of family and hired labour for a set of eight EU member states. To this end, we estimate augmented production functions using FADN data for the years 2001-2008. The...

I develop a two-stage political economy model that explicitly models the complexity of decision-making in the European Union on the Common Agricultural Policy, and I derive how the institutional design affects the outcome and the influence of the various agents involved, and the likelihood of...

Employing correlation analysis, we investigate whether rural development in the EU countries is associated with their institutional quality represented by “good” governance indicators of the World Bank (voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory...

New 2007-13 planning framework of the EU keeps using economic criteria (GDP) to identify those regions requiring priority attention (convergence objective). Although these criteria are useful for the overall Regional Policy, nevertheless it might result some planning failures of the strategies...

During the process of the budgetary review the CAP faces its greatest challenge of its history: not only the (common) financing of the CAP, but the future of the CAP itself is at stake. It is obvious that the reform steps implemented so far – even though they have several forward-looking...

Following the decoupling of agricultural support from productions, the likelihood that payments get capitalised into farmland rent or sale prices has increased. In this study, the issue of capitalisation is examined for the case of regions in the EU and the three year (2006- 2008) time span...

This paper examines the determinants of exit from agriculture under the implementation of CAP payments in four selected EU countries (France, Hungary, Italy and Poland) in the period 2005-08. The main results suggest that total subsidies at the regional level reduce the out-farm migration of...