This article explores the economic conditions for the viability of organic farming in a context of imperfect competition. While most research dealing with this issue has adopted an empirical approach, we propose a theoretical foundation. Farmers have a choice between two technologies, the...

This case study compares the environmental efficiency of non-certified organic and conventional rice production in southern China. Using plot-season level survey data, we first test the existence of a "technology gap" between the two types of production, and then calculate the environmental...

Since 2003, a grass-roots movement of New Rural Reconstruction (NRR) has emerged in China to experience alternative model of rural development. The movement adopts a particular approach for rural development on basis of rural social and cultural reconstruction. In order to understand this social...

This paper aims to test the effect of smallholder farmers' participatory social learning on their gain of performance in a village of southwest China. By exploring a panel structure survey data collected in the village, we identify the social learning effect using a Spatial Autoregressive (SAR)...

Short-term increasing returns to production factors are usually found in empirical studies. We argue they can be due to omitted variables, particularly the intensity of factor utilisation. Thanks to original French firm-level data (1992-2008), we show how increasing returns to scale disappear...

In this paper, we present international comparisons of potential output growth among several economies -Canada, the euro area, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States- for the period 1991-2004, for which we construct consistent and homogenous...

This article presents an empirical model of non-stationary and cointegrated panel data to explain the impact of industrial property, measured by patents, on the GDP of 10 Latin America countries during the period 1990 to 2010. Apply traditional unit root tests and unit root test of art, which...

Increasingly more studies are raising concerns about the increasing consumption of meat and the increasing amount of crops (cereals and oilseeds in particular) used to feed animals and that could be used to feed people. The evolution of this amount is very sensitive to human diets and to the...

Increasing concerns about environmental and social impacts have made multicriteria analysis (MCA) increasingly popular in decision making processes. The present paper proposes a new methodology which allows taking into account multicriteria aspects, stakeholder's preferences and long time...