Subsidies linked to production have been classified to be environmentally harmful by OECD. A core element of the EU 2003 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform is to decouple income support from production. This paper estimates the environmental consequences of this policy reform. An...

Organic farming practices have environmental benefits compared to conventional ones. Their adoption is the result of a complex interaction of intrinsic attitudes of farmers, their profit expectations and farm policy incentives. We use an agricultural sector model and develop an extended version...

Based on a sample of 1,084 European regions (EU 15) over the period of 1995-2004, we estimate the determinants of regional growth of GDP per capita, allowing for both spatial lag and spatial error dependence. We find that robust LM tests cannot reject the null hypothesis of no spatial dependence...

Direct payments are the most important expenditure of the Common Agricultural Policy. They are mostly in the form of decoupled direct payments which are intended to be allocatively neutral. Increasing volumes of such transfers imply that distributive aspects of CAP expenditures become more...

A small number of firms have a large market share in the Austrian food retailing market. Market concentration has been growing over the last years which has raised concerns about market power. Previous studies on price setting behaviour in the food retailing market were at the national level and...

The expansion of renewable energy sources is an EU strategy to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels and to curb carbon dioxide emission. According to studies estimating technical potentials, significant land resources can be mobilised for the production of energy crops. We estimate the costs of...

Prices for major farm commodities have undergone a substantial rise since 2002, driven up by growing demand as well as increasing energy prices. For the next years, prices for agricultural produce are expected to remain substantially above the level they had attained the start of the decade.

The introduction of decoupled direct payments in the EU was a substantial change of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2003. After decoupling direct payments from production, it has become evident, that distributional objectives are the major justification of farm payments. There are three...

We analyse whether the 2003 CAP reform and the anticipated new program of rural development will lead to an expansion or a reduction of organic farming. An extended version of the Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) method is developed in order to differentiate organic farming from...