The new European Council Regulation on support for rural development (EC) No. 1698/2005 has opened up the opportunity for two important innovations for the design and implementation of agrienvironmental measures: local action groups (LAG) according to the LEADER approach and calls for tender....

EC Regulation 1257/99 of 17 May 1999 underlines the intention of the European Commission of an integrated rural development policy. In this paper the chances are examined that this new policy orientation offers for a more multifunctional agriculture. Possibilities for the implementation of...

Until now, organic farming in Austria saw its largest growth in the period between 1994 and 1998. The following factors all contributed to Austria achieving the highest percentage of organic farms in Europe: the early addition of guidelines for organic crop production and animal husbandry to the...

Organic farming is promoted financially in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1989. The entire segment shows a very dynamic development since that time. In the past eleven years, the organically managed land area has increased more than ten-fold. Now, a large bouquet of measures are offered...

This paper proposes a trade restrictiveness indicator that explicitly incorporates environmental externalities. The index employs directional distance functions and use indicators (i.e. differences rather than ratios) modified to account for and evaluate efficiency changes in the face of...

Sustainability standards for biofuel production calculated via life cycle accounting (LCA) require a certain reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions relative to gasoline. Recently it has been shown that LCA gives biased results and should be extended to incorporate indirect land use change...

The following analysis leads to an empirically based ranking, which embodies political decision makers to evaluate the necessity of horizontal co-ordination for different issues concerning nature and landscape conservation. First of all the relevant German law and order as well as its spatial...