Recently, several studies compared the performance of conventional and organic farms. Most studies concentrated on technical efficiency. In this paper we add to this literature by also comparing the scale efficiency of conventional and organic milk farms in Austria during the period 1997-2002....

In most industrialized countries farmers as a small and well-organized group are able to influence government decisions to get rent-creating proposals enacted. Two different views are presented to explain why: the Chicagoan view ("Efficient Redistribution Hypothesis") and the Virginian view...

In this paper I improve Gardner's surplus transformation curve framework by assuming that governments are able to vary many policy instruments simultaneously instead of only one. I use my framework to find the combination of the currently used instruments which provides the most efficient income...

Since most agricultural programs employ two or more policy instruments simultaneously, it is notable that little research has attempted to find optimal instrument combinations and no research exists which evaluates the social costs (unrealized benefits) of combining instruments suboptimally. In...