Like in many fen land regions in East Germany, long-standing intensive arable farming -enabled by reclamation - has caused soil deterioration and high water runoff in the Schraden region. More than ten years of economic and political transformation that followed the breakdown of the socialist...

The Working Paper compiles three contributions of a regional workshop on "Regional Networks in Agriculture" jointly organized by three subprojects of the DFG-Research Group SUTRA. The workshop took place on January 13, 2005 in Bad Liebenwerda in the district (Landkreis) Elbe-Elster in the German...

Ex-ante Bewertungsverfahren von Agrar- und Umweltpolitiken und Politiken für den ländlichen Raum sind integrative Bestandteile des politischen Entscheidungsprozesses in der Europäischen Union. Während es bereits eine Mehrzahl von quantitativen Agrar- Umwelt-Modellen gibt, die sowohl soziale,...

Ex-ante impact assessment of agricultural, environmental, and rural policies has become an integral part of political decision making processes in the EU. While there is a large variety of agri-environmental modelling tools available to analyse likely social, economic, and environmental impacts...

The paper aims at a conceptual contribution to the normative economic analysis of rural de-velopment (RD) policies. RD is regarded as a problem of interaction between individuals; (lacking) structural change or the (missing) integration of externalities are therefore recon-structed as...

ABSTRACT Social capital is defined as the shared knowledge, trust, and culture, embodied in the structural forms of networks and other stable inter-agent relationships. Social capital has been shown to be more difficult to build than economic capital, and to have greater beneficial effects for...

Since the beginning of the 1990s a new rural development policy, which has later been called the "new rural paradigm" by the OECD, has received increasing attention in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere. It is expected that these policy measures attenuate social and economic problems in rural...

Subsistence agriculture is probably the least understood and the most neglected type of agriculture. In a globalised, market-driven world, it remains at the same time a myth and a marginal phenomenon. Empirically, subsistence agriculture for a long time seemed to be restricted to developing...

This volume of proceedings, available as both a hard copy and a pdf file, is an edited compilation of selected contributions to the MACE Conference 2009, held in Berlin, Germany, at the ICC from 14 to 15 January 2009. We would like to thank all those persons and organisations who contributed to...