Within this paper, we present an interactive modelling approach to support budgeting decisions at the program level and discuss its potential and limitations to contribute to more objective-oriented policy-making. The central feature of the approach is a linear optimisation model which is...

Many economic analysis tools are used to evaluate the effects of policies on rural development. However, a number of unexplored options are still available from the literature about policy analysis and biophysical systems representations. A particularly important need concerns the representation...

The main objective of this paper is to evaluate ex-post the effects of the 2003 reform, in particular decoupling, of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the European Union (EU), with a specific focus on farm investment behaviour. In the past years a number of studies have addressed the issue...

The rural areas in Bulgaria cover more then 80% of the country territory and account for about 29% of the population. Their development depends strongly on agricultural sector. The paper examines structural changes in agriculture, labour market situation in rural areas and presents the main...

The paper focuses on the competitiveness of organic horticultural farms implementing short food supply chain (SFSC), by analysing the organisational structures adopted by farmers and their economic performance. The collection of data based on face to face interviews with farmers and the review...

The food chain concept is an increasingly common theoretical instrument for food and rural development policy and many countries adopt the so-called “new rural paradigm”, so to integrate different sectoral policies. This paper aims at adopting the food chain paradigm in order to analyse the...

The European Union (EU) introduced a special transitional semi-subsistence measure to promote the smallest agricultural producers, so-called semi-subsistence farm households (SFHs) in the enlargement process. An outlook on the future of SFHs requires comprehensive and reliable information on the...

Edited volume of the contributions to the mini-symposium of the same title at the IAAE conference 2009.

This paper analyses costs and benefits of planting trees on marginal lands across forestry zones in Ukraine with the purpose of using them for timber production, erosion prevention and climate change mitigation. The research reveals that establishment of new forests to increase timber production...

Investment models typically explain only a small share of the total investment variation within or between firms. A reason for this may be that those models do not explicitly differentiate between the decision to invest and the decision about the level of investment. In this paper, a two-steps...