This article deals with the issue of entry into an industry where firms share a collective reputation. First, we show that free entry is not socially optimal; there is a need for regulation through the imposition of a minimum quality standard. Second, we argue that a minimum quality standard can...

Greening the economy is mostly about improving water governance and not only about putting the existing resource saving technical alternatives into practice. Focusing on the second and forgetting the first risks finishing with a highly efficient use of water services at the level of each...

Hungary is home to a great diversity of plant and animal species, whose preservation is of global value. This paper focuses on the institutional aspects of the research project on on-farm conservation of crop genetic resources in three Environmentally Sensitive Areas of Hungary (Dévaványa,...

In many low-income countries, agriculture is mostly rain-fed and yields highly depend on climatic factors. Furthermore, farmers have little access to traditional crop insurance, which suffers from high information asymmetry and transaction costs. Insurances based on meteorological indices could...

This paper provides an overview of the Italian water management system, with particular reference to the links between agriculture and water resources, and emphasis on underground resources. Our objective is mainly descriptive at this level; nonetheless, we try to evaluate patterns of...

Motivated by the conclusions from various modelling studies, modifications to the bioenergy sector regulations are under way in Europe and in the USA to account for emissions from indirect land-use change (ILUC). Despite their influence on the policy-making, evaluations of the capacity of...

Water resources are facing several stresses in terms of quantity and quality. These pressures are closely related to the human interventions in fields like: agriculture, land-use/land use change, construction/management of reservoirs, pollutant emissions, and water /wastewater treatment, among...

Agricultural biodiversity is a crucial environmental resource. Much of the agricultural biodiversity remaining today is found on the semi-subsistence farms of poorer countries and on the small-scale farms and home gardens of more industrialised nations. The traditional Hungarian home gardens,...

This paper investigates the private provision of public goods in segregated societies. While most research agrees that segregation undermines public provision, the findings are mixed for private provision: social interactions, being strong within groups and limited across groups, may either...

Which kind of reaction can a nation or group of nations expect when leading by example in climate policy? This literature survey describes possible positive reaction mechanisms from different fields of economics, some of which have scarcely been linked to climate economics previously. One effect...