The proposals for reforming the Common Agricultural Policy within the Mid Term Review of the European Commission fueled the discussion about the future of direct payments to farmers. The EU Commission recommends a decoupling of animal and area payments from the production by granting these...

The complexity of agri-environmental economic issues is such that a model that is fully consistent at all levels of aggregation and all type of questions to be addressed is not available at the Agricultural Economics Research Institute in the Hague LEI. Such a model is probably also not...

This paper identifies major future trends and driving factors and perspectives and challenges resulting from them for European agriculture and food sectors until the year 2020. The focus of the paper is an analysis of key driving forces and the provision of a well developed reference scenario...

Analyses of the impact of European policies on agricultural change are most often based on agricultural sector models. Such models have their limitations: they cannot specify the interaction between agriculture and the rest of the economy, and their spatial dimension is usually limited. Land use...

Decoupling of direct payments can be expected to have complex effects and the net effect on crop and fodder acreage is unclear. A literature review reveals that various simulation models uniformly project a decline of the cereal and silage maize acreage as well as ruminant production in the...

Planning agricultural and environmental programmes has become a complex task. In this paper we show how interactive programming can help to solve such complex policy decision-making problems. The basic linear programming model is implemented with Excel. We show, for a hypothetical agricultural...

Over the last decades the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been increasingly influenced by the WTO negotiations. The Mac-Sharry-Reform and the Mid Term Review (MTR) reform of the CAP for example improved the conformity between the EU agricultural policy and the liberalization requirements...

This paper sets out to develop an economic framework for ex post evaluations of agri-environmental schemes. We begin by developing a non-parametric model for estimating farm-level environmental efficiency scores. We then use this efficiency framework to devise a set of economic criteria for...