This article provides an overview of the most important reforms, their background, and corresponding changes in Estonian agriculture during the transition period from 1988-2008. The past two decades have been divided into three sub-periods to outline differences in dynamics and the direction of...

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....

The collectivisation of agriculture in most socialistic countries was connected with the development of a dual enterprise structure of large-scale farms and household plots. In Russia, in contrast to other European transition countries, this structure in most regions remained in the main...

In Anbetracht zunehmender Einkommensschwankungen aufgrund von Witterungsextremen und höherer Volatilitäten an den Agrarrohstoffmärkten fordert der Deutsche Bauernverband im Ertragsteuerrecht die Einführung einer Risikoausgleichsrücklage für landwirtschaftliche Einkünfte....

Food risks may be caused by moral hazard, i.e. by opportunistic behaviour of upstream sellers who exploit the fact that many food product qualities remain uncertain to downstream buyers in the course of conventional market transactions (credence qualities). Due to this lack of market...

Optimization has been recognized as a powerful tool in teaching and research for a long time. In spite of its well known problem solving capacity, some methodological obstacles have persisted over the years. The main problem is that stochastic variables and their correlations cannot be...

Investment decisions are, as a rule, characterized by uncertainty, irreversibility and flexibility. Simple net present value calculations will not account for these features. In many situations even flexible investment planning with decision trees, which represents the most advanced method of...

Since the mid-nineties, agricultural economists discuss the suitability of “weather derivatives†as hedging instruments for volumetric risks in agriculture. Contrary to traditional insurance contracts, the payoffs of such derivatives are linked to weather indices (e.g. accumulated...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the performance of different Value-at-Risk (VaR) models in the context of risk assessment in hog production. The paper starts with a description of traditional VaR models, i.e. Variance-Covariance-Method (VCM) and Historical Simulation (HS). We...

In this paper we examine whether there is room for improvement in farm program decisions through the integration of formal mathematical optimisation into the planning process. Probing the potential for improvement, we investigate the cases of four Brandenburg cash crop farms over the last six...