In October 2011 the European Commission presented a set of legal proposals designed to make the Common Agricultural Policy more effective. Pending a debate in the European Parliament and the Council, approval is expected by the end of 2013. This Forum aims to identify the proposals' shortcomings...

Der steile Anstieg der Nahrungsmittelpreise hat zu einer allgemeinen Verunsicherung geführt. Nach Ansicht von Joachim von Braun, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, können die Lebensmittelpreise langfristig nur durch eine Steigerung der Produktion stabilisiert werden. Vor...

The paper empirically investigates credit access and borrowing costs in Poland's rural financial market. We conduct an econometric analysis based on cross-sectional survey data including formal loans taken in the period 1997-1999. A hedonic regression of the effective interest rate, comprising...

The aim of this paper is to empirically analyse the effects of governmentally promoted credit access on the investment behaviour of credit rationed farmers. This is done by specifying an empirical investment equation which is estimated on a cross-sectional sample of Polish farm household data....

Empirical analysis of rural credit market failure has been of key scientific and political interest in recent years. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of various methods for measuring credit rationing of farms employed in the literature. Furthermore, based on a common analytical...

Based on a case study of two Moldovan regions, the paper challenges the favourable assessment of recently established peasant farms in a World Bank study by LERMAN et al. (1998). The main arguments in favour of a more critical view of the results of land privatisation and farm restructuring are...