Groundwater has the characteristics of commonly owned property, and its use is likely to be inefficient in the absence of regulation. Several management tools can be used to regulate groundwater withdrawals, with no one tool dominating the others in terms of efficiency of water use. However, the...

A theory of settlement planning focussing on village-level production services is presented, and settlement plans are compared. The analysis draws on the modern theory of local public goods. Conditions for optimal level of services and optimum settlement size are derived, together with rules of...

The well-known Allais paradox is reformulated as a daily farm decision problem. Only 26% of the farmers exhibit violations of the expected utility hypothesis. Moreover, the tendency for violation decreases with the farm operator's education, experience and family size. No effects of the farm...

A theoretical framework is developed to study the effects of socioeconomic factors on farmers' risk attitudes and production decisions. No maintained assumptions about the individual's utility are required. A key element in this framework is the categorization of socioeconomic factors by their...

The study investigates the value of additional information on the response function to soil salinity of a given crop (potatoes), with regard to a stochastic long-run optimization model for utilization of saline water in a single-farm framework. The analysis provides a conceptual and...

Uncertainty about the possibility of acquiring land can be rather large in the EU for sectors like dairy farming. Farm-level investment decisions are commonly made ex-ante when the farmer is not certain about the possibility of purchasing land. This possibility is realized only in a future...

The economic implications of plant density for irrigation water use under saline conditions are investigated, utilizing the involved physical and biological relationships. The analysis considers a single crop and is applied to cotton data. The results suggest that treating plant density as an...

This study examines the optimal allocation of funds between national and urban parks. Since travel costs to national parks are significantly higher than to urban parks, poor households tend to visit the latter more frequently, whereas rich households favor the former. Therefore, allocating...

The risk premium and the probability premium are used to determine appropriate coefficients of absolute risk aversion under CARA utility. A defensible range of risk aversion coefficients is defined by the coefficients that correspond to risk premiums falling between 1 and 99% of the amount at...

The new Rural Development Regulation of the EU reflects the shift of attention within rural areas from agricultural production towards rural development and embraces both, farmers and non-farm residents. While agricultural production is required to comply with environmental standards, rural...