Organic farming is promoted financially in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1989. The entire segment shows a very dynamic development since that time. In the past eleven years, the organically managed land area has increased more than ten-fold. Now, a large bouquet of measures are offered...

The conversion to organic farming has proven to be an economically interesting alternative for a large portion of the converted farms in the past. This contribution will consider the question of which factors influence the success of organic farming. The basis for the study is a series of data...

Since the beginning of transition, interregional disparities in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) have increased. Particularly, the differences between urban and rural areas have grown. This paper traces the development of these disparities and discusses, based on theoretical...

This paper employs Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis to examine the technical efficiency of the agricultural sectors of the Central and Eastern European accession Countries (CEECs) during the period 1998-2001. The results indicate that the agricultural sectors of many...

This paper sets out to develop an economic framework for ex post evaluations of agri-environmental schemes. We begin by developing a non-parametric model for estimating farm-level environmental efficiency scores. We then use this efficiency framework to devise a set of economic criteria for...

Due to Germany’s specific farm structure, the progressive modulation of direct payments decided within the Health Check of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is of particular relevance for German agriculture. In this paper we apply the agent-based model AgriPoliS to shed some light on the...

The transition of East German agriculture led to major structural adjustments that showed some very particular phenomena. For instance, most of the successors of the former agricultural production cooperatives (LPGs) make slight losses and they operate at a higher employment level than new and...

The paper analyses various forms of direct payments using the agent-based model AgriPoliS. The model is fitted to the agricultural region 'Hohenlohe' in Baden-Württemberg which is characterised by intensive livestock farming. The policy simulations show that decoupled payments which are...

The EU Commission suggests to exclude CEC from the dynamic modulation mechanism, being part of the MTR package. This article looks at the distributional aspects of including the CEC into dynamic modulation. Under the current accession proposal the CEC would account for only 18% of the rural...