Die Politik zur Entwicklung ländlicher Räume als 2. Säule der Agrarpolitik kann als Hybrid aus Agrar-, Umwelt- und Regionalpolitik charakterisiert werden. Die ausgeprägten vertikalen (EU-Bund-Bundesländer) und horizontalen Verflechtungen und das inhaltlich breite Maßnahmenspektrum der...

Im Koalitionsvertrag der Bundesregierungsparteien SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen und FDP ist festgehalten, dass die Gemeinschaftsaufgabe 'Verbesserung der Agrarstruktur und des Küstenschutzes' (GAK) stärker an den Zielen der Koalition ausgerichtet werden solle. Das Bundesministerium für...

Rural development has significantly benefited from intensifying relations between the government and third sector organizations (TSOs) during the last several decades. TSOs can induce innovation in rural development in a variety of ways including advocacy, awareness raising, contracting, and...

This paper examines and compares institutional arrangements addressing market failures endemic to rural areas. It argues that rural market failures cannot be satisfactorily addressed by for-profit firms and thus require the operation of third sector organizations, such as NGOs, cooperatives, and...

Sustainability of nonprofit organizations is a key concern for today’s nonprofit scholars and practitioners. Building upon the nonprofit economics literature, the present paper introduces the distinction between the demand-side and supply-side determinants of nonprofit sustainability and makes...

Purpose: Despite the worldwide importance of third sector organizations in rural areas, the theoretical connection between the third sector and rural development remains largely unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical explanation of why and how third sector...

The paper aims at a conceptual contribution to the normative economic analysis of rural de-velopment (RD) policies. RD is regarded as a problem of interaction between individuals; (lacking) structural change or the (missing) integration of externalities are therefore recon-structed as...

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....

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...