Agricultural policy reform has been an important source of change in the Chinese agricultural sector. The reforms led to productivity growth and helped China in pursuing its self-sufficiency goal especially in the grain sector. To analyse whether observable productivity growth stems from...

The analysis of price transmission between raw and processed agricultural products in transition countries is complicated by the frequently changing conditions on their way from plan to market. We utilise a Markov-switching vector error correction model to allow for multiple regime shifts in the...

Incorporating the ecological variable of grassland Net Primary Productivity (NPP) into the production function - to be representative of grassland quality - is a new step toward the ecological efficiency analysis under the field of productivity and efficiency analysis. We measure the technical...

The paper investigates the impact of subsidies and of para-agriculture on the technical efficiency of organic farms in Switzerland, Austria and Southern Germany. The data-set consists of bookkeeping data with 1,704 observations in the years 2003 to 2005. Technical efficiency is modelled using a...

Market liberalization in Central and Eastern Europe was targeted at establishing incentives that would improve economic performance. While substantial reorganization of enterprises is observed, firms can also be observed which devote resources towards establishing organizational legitimacy....

An important approach to reducing persistent technical inefficiency is through technical change. This paper considers the case of genetically modified crop production. A stochastic frontier approach is used to examine how a drastic change from non-GM to GM technology effects the position of the...

One of the most important targets of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is to facilitate the spatial integration of agricultural markets within the individual member states as well as within the Community. On a spatially integrated market, price information should freely flow between member...

After more than ten years of rural development programmes in Andalusia, there is ongoing concern about the sustainability of the rural development initiated by the LEADER-PRODER programmes in the hypothetical event that such programmes were no longer in place. In order to be able to express an...

The research analyses the Sicilian Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) olive oils chain in the contest of Sicilian rural development and as an instrument aimed to add value to agricultural production. Olive oil is a characteristic product of Southern Italian and Mediterranean agriculture and...

Consumers face information problems in choosing certain types of foods that best match their preferences and assure satisfaction. For fresh fruits, expectations about the easting experience cannot be assured through external inspection of the product at the time of purchase, nor necessarily...