This paper argues that mainstream economics does not follow the positivist research tradition it (often implicitly) claims to follow and expresses some serious doubt that econometrics in particular can make economics a hard science. Mathematical rigour and sophisticated statistical techniques...

The aim of this paper is to present an analysis of farm-level data collected in a survey of 464 Polish farms in 2000. Performance indicators of farms in three Polish voivodships are compared with farm accountancy data from two German Länder. The results show that Polish farms were much less...

The present study assesses the state of doctoral research and postgraduate education in agricultural economics in higher education institutions (HEI) in Uzbekistan and outlines initiatives for change. To better understand the content, process, and outcomes of postgraduate education and doctoral...

With the goal of reducing the dependency on oil revenues, the Government of Kazakhstan has recently increased its budget allocations to prop up the domestic agricultural sector. Yet, many observers agree that it is less the amount of public spending that induces long-term growth than the quality...

In Central Asia, community water governance institutions emerged and prevailed for a long time. By employing an analytical modelling approach using variants of the evolutionary Hawk-Dove game, we scrutinise three epochs' (pre-Tsarist, Tsarist and Soviet) coordination mechanisms and qualitatively...

How to revitalise the cattle and dairy sectors under the WTO commitments has emerged as a major policy challenge for the Russian government. This article raises the question whether livestock recovery in East Germany does provide any insights that could be of value to current policy makers in...

We examine the plausibility of four established and innovative identification strategies for agricultural production functions using farm-level panel datasets from five EU countries. Newly suggested proxy and dynamic panel approaches provide attractive conceptual improvements over received...

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

By focusing on direct monetary incentives, the traditional literature on motivating workers predicts that high-effort outcomes are unlikely unless workers become residual claimants of profit. However, real world employment contracts typically display a low incidence of profit sharing. In this...

In der derzeitigen Diskussion um die Reform der Gemeinsamen Agrarpolitik (GAP) spielt das Argument der positiven Beschäftigungswirkungen eine zentrale Rolle. Wir untersuchen seine Stichhaltigkeit mithilfe einer Ex-Post-Evaluierung der Zahlungen in 69 Landkreisen Brandenburgs, Sachsens und...