The purpose of this study is to evaluate ethanol cost- effectiveness with regards to carbon dioxide emissions. Actually, bio-fuel production is only viable thanks to the tax credit policy resulting in economic ‘deadweight’ loss. The environmental performance is assessed under the Life Cycle...

This paper presents the concept and the design of a hybrid renewable energy polygeneration microgrid along with its technical and economical evaluation. The energy of the sun and the wind is harvested by photovoltaics and a wind turbine. Besides that, the components of the microgrid include a...

Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) is one of the most commonly used methods of calibrating activity linear programming (LP) models in agriculture. PMP applications published thus far focus on the estimation of a farm’s nonlinear cost or profit function and rely on the recovery of...

A web based Spatial Decision Support System (web SDSS) has been implemented in Thessaly, the most significant arable cropping region in Greece, in order to evaluate selected energy crop supply. The web SDSS uses an optimization module to support the decision process, incorporating user input...

"A sector model presented in this article, uses about 200 representative French cereal-oriented farms to estimate policy impacts by means of mathematical modeling. Usually, such models suppose that farmers intend to maximize expected gross margin. This rationality hypothesis however seems hardly...

The 2003 CAP reform considerably affects cropping patterns in European agriculture. At the same time the imperatives of the forthcoming Water Framework Directive (WFD) is expected to modify irrigation decisions especially in Southern Europe where irrigated agriculture utilizes about 70-80% of...

This paper examines evolutions of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) decoupling regime and their impacts on Greek arable agriculture. Policy analysis is performed by using mathematical programming tools. Taking into account increasing uncertainty, we assume that farmers perceive gross margin...

Environmental consciousness and accompanying actions have been paralleled by the evolution of multi-criteria methods which have provided tools to assist policy makers in discovering compromises in order to muddle through. This paper recalls the development of multi-criteria methods in...

By the end of year 2010, each member state of the European Union (the EU) ought to incorporate 5.75% of bio-fuels in the total of fuels used for transportation purposes. In order to achieve such a target, tax incentives are implemented by the French government given that the production of...

A mathematical programming model based on a countrywide sample of farms is used to assess the impacts of the new C.A.P on the supply of the cotton sector in Greece. Results show a decrease in cotton cultivated area along with the introduction of a new production system called "semi-abandonment...