Sustainable development is both a global and local challenge to managing change. It requires integrating social, ecological and economic objectives and system requirements that are generally expressed in terms of maintaining some suitably defined aggregates of social, ecological and economic...

We investigate environmental aspects of agriculture from a welfare economic perspective and show that both positive and negative effects exhibit the character of undepletable externalities. To internalise these externalities while taking equity concerns into account, we propose compensation of...

Joint production of agriculture commodities and environmental goods and services is a key attribute of multifunctionality. However, complex natural and economic interactions make a sound analysis difficult. In this regard, the concept of economies of scope provides a simple policy oriented...

This paper analyzes the evolution of Swiss farm productivity during the implementation of environmental policy reforms, when subsidization of farms became dependent on compliance with environmental regulations. We employ a production model formulation with technology parameters defined as the...

The improvement of the sustainable performance of the agricultural sector is a priority of the Swiss agricultural policy. The sustainability of Swiss dairy farms located in the mountainous area might be critical as many of them show a weak performance in the use of their economic and/or social...

The contribution outlines the goals, the organisational structures and the key issues of the NRP 48 (National Research Programme). In addition, it gives an overview of the subjects covered by the 35 on-going research projects. On this basis, the stakeholders dealing with subjects relating to...

Farmers' decisions about conversion to organic farming are analyzed with a structural equation model. The Theory of Planned Behavior (ToPB), one of the prominent theories in the social psychology, is used as the theoretical basis of this study. Though ToPB is a well-defined theory, it is static...

The research objective is to shed light on the structural adjustment process of farming enterprises in Switzerland. To this end, an analytical tool is developed which allows us to identify the most important influencing factors and to estimate in advance their effects on the structural...

Among the second-best approaches for the regulation of pollution, little attention has been paid to the distorting effect of intensive margin policies on the extensive margin. This article shows, within a dynamic framework, that regulation of the intensive margin has to be complemented by...