Over fifteen years have elapsed since the transition from the centrally planned economic system started in the early 1990âs. During this time agricultural and rural areas of Central and Eastern Europe have undergone profound structural changes with wide variations in the degree of...

The main objective of this paper is to evaluate ex-post the effects of the 2003 reform, in particular decoupling, of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the European Union (EU), with a specific focus on farm investment behaviour. In the past years a number of studies have addressed the issue...

Organic and low-input farming practices are considered keystones for the conservation of biodiversity in semi-natural systems. Accordingly, attention to the assessment of the benefits stemming from these activities is increasing in order to provide a solid base for the adoption of...

In order to measure agriculture sustainability, the efficient use of inputs becomes a crucial issue. In this perspective, the analysts concentrate their attention on the total factor productivity index (TFP). In this view, Lynam and Herdt (1989) proposed the TFP as a suitable assessment of the...

China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of agricultural products, but the intensive agriculture contributes in a remarkable manner to environmental problems. Since environmental protection has recently become a popular issue in China, the government attaches great importance to the...

Nitrogen is an important input to agricultural production but also detrimentally affects the environmental quality of air, soil and water. Identifying the determinants of nitrate pollution and in turn defining sensible performance indicators to design, enforce and monitor regulatory policies is...

Agriculture is the main user of the world’s water resources. Due to increasing concern on water quality and quantity, there is a growing interest to use the scarce water resources in the most efficient way to feed the growing world population. By employing a meta-analysis, this paper shows...

The Health Check (HC) of the European Common Agricultural Policy in 2003 sped up the process of policy reforms toward decoupled payments in order to urge agricultural production to respond to market signals. However, since decoupled payments could generate “coupled” effects on production, it...

Recently the olive sector has had important changes in Andalusia due to both the enlargement and the intensification of farming. The expansion of the olive grove in Andalusia is causing sustainability problems, not only from the socio-economic dimension (profit reduction) but environmental...

The paper aims to study the effects of reducing pesticide use by farmers in the arable sector in France and the feasibility of a policy target of reducing pesticide use by half. The originality of the approach is to combine statistical data and expert knowledge to describe low-input alternative...