Objectives of this paper is to verify whether the relationship between the level of per capita income and the environment quality, for the Italian regions, follows the prescription of an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), taking into account the contribution of agriculture and rural areas. The...

Payments to the agricultural sector are designated to decrease gradually. One of the consequences of such a process will be a reduction in the number of farms and thereby in the defence of territory. The expansion of areas with hydro geological problems is a global matter. During the 2011 the...

The recent CAP reform proposes a green component of the first pillar of the CAP that remunerates farmers for the provision of environmental public goods, by conditioning the 30% of direct payments to specific requirements. The paper focuses on two of the greening obligations of the reform...

The objective of this paper is to study the effect of agricultural policies on marketing decisions as well as the link between marketing and production decisions. We develop an analytical model to study how policies affect marketing decisions and conditions under which the two types of decisions...

Modern animal production has been criticised for the lack of animal-friendly production practices. The goal of this paper is to examine how animal welfare could be improved in pig fattening by providing producers with extra incentives. The focus is on three preventive and one mitigative...

Irrigation water use by agriculture has been identified as one of the major sustainable water management issues in the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD). This paper aims at developing a simulation framework to jointly assess agricultural and water issues. While the strong...

The debate on optimization of policies and instruments of the European agriculture has been lasting for several decades and still there is no unified opinion on that aspect. Although there is an unanimity on targets these policies should achieve, there is an ongoing discussion on policy tools...

Risk management and income stabilization have been gaining increasing attention in the EU’s agricultural policy debate, also in connection to the recent proposal of a specific package of measures hypothesized in the ongoing CAP reform. The paper summarizes the current policy picture at EU and...

Foot and Mouth disease, like other epizootic outbreaks, can have wide and lasting impacts exceeding the agricultural field. Within Europe various ad hoc policies exist to cope with these consequences. In this paper we develop a dynamic CGE model allowing us to simulate a FMD outbreak, its...

Three specific aspects of agricultural risk management are addressed 1. Recent developments in price volatility and yield risk 2. The role of policy: - Subsidized crop insurance with examples from the massive US program ($115 billion in liability in 2011) - The 2012 US Farm Bill, which is...