This paper is concerned with agri-environmental policy in Germany and focuses in particular on soil and water conservation. At first it discusses to what extent agriculture contributes to erosion and the pollution of surface waters and groundwater with nutrients and pesticides. Whereas erosion...

Croatia is very close to meeting the requirements necessary for becoming a member of the European Union (EU). On February 6, 2008, the European Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said that accession negotiations with Croatia are moving ahead well. As in all new member states (NMS), the...

Seit den 1990er-Jahren befindet sich die Ukraine in andauernden Umgestaltungen des politischen und ökonomischen Systems. Durch die institutionellen, strukturellen und wirtschaftlichen Reformen und Integrationsbemühungen veränderte sich unter anderem die Produktions- und Handelsstruktur...

This paper is concerned with environmental impacts in Russia, focusing in particular on agriculturally induced environmental impacts. First it discusses the current environmental situation in Russia. The paper provides an overview of Russia, including a description of its geographical and...

Economic reform in China helped transform the structure and volume of agricultural production and resulted in significant changes in efficiency and productivity. This paper measures agricultural technical efficiency (TE) and total factor productivity (TFP) in China by allowing producers...

During the transition of the Vietnamese economy, adaptation of the financial system was one of the most challenging reforms. A major task of this reform was to expand the financial systemâs outreach to the newly emerging private sector and household economies, especially in rural areas....

This volume of proceedings, available as both a hard copy and a pdf file, is an edited compilation of selected contributions to the MACE Conference 2009, held in Berlin, Germany, at the ICC from 14 to 15 January 2009. We would like to thank all those persons and organisations who contributed to...

Although interest in the structure and relational features of social capital and its underlying networks has grown since the early 1990s, the terms do not embody any ideas that are really new to sociologists, but are indeed rather new to economists. Until the 1950s, land, labour, and financial...

Since the beginning of the 1990s a new rural development policy, which has later been called the "new rural paradigm" by the OECD, has received increasing attention in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere. It is expected that these policy measures attenuate social and economic problems in rural...

The increasing importance of measures under the so called "second pillar" of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union raises new challenges to decision-makers. The definition and operationalisation of goals as well as the implementation of concrete measures is a complex task....