The redistributive implications of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU) have regained a strong interest in recent years since economic and social cohe-sion has become a major goal of European policy. The empirical evidence is surprisingly di-verse and ranges from a...

Index-based weather insurances are innovative tools for mitigating weather risks in agriculture.Several donor agencies and development organisations are investing substantially topropagate these programmes in developing countries. However, often due to high basis risks,these products mitigate...

The optimisation of production plans is an important topic in agriculture, often related to diversificationand specialisation as the classical instruments of coping with production risk. Althoughthe measurement of embedded risk is often inaccurate, it is nevertheless necessary for decisionmaking...

The risks associated with farming activities are likely to increase in the future. It, therefore, appears worthwhile to analyse new risk management instruments. This paper investigates weather derivatives for which a market has already emerged in the USA. Contrary to traditional financial...

This paper investigates the farm level impacts of multiple peril yield and revenue insurance in an expected value-variance framework. The analysis is conducted using stochastic simulation jointly with numerical optimisation. Simulation is used to compute the means and variances of revenues as...

Recent and presumable future developments tend to increase the risk associated with farming activities. This causes an increasing importance of risk management. Farmers have a wide variety of possibilities to influence the risk exposure of their operations. Among them are the choice of the...

In this paper we develop a theoretical model of competition among marketing cooperatives (co-ops) in a spatial market setting assuming uniform delivered pricing and Löschian conduct. The model is an extension to Alvarez et al.’s (2000) spatial competition model for investorowned firms (IOF)....

Small countries may benefit from the formation of a trade bloc, since their combined market power will enable them to manipulate the terms of trade. The question of interest is whether countries will benefit from the enlargement of a trading bloc, if trade liberalization induces countries to...

Dynamic evolutions of resource stocks with stochastic elements in the transition equation are in general very difficult to master. Their handling requires a deep understanding of control theory, probability theory and sometimes even of game theory due to strategic interaction of ‘'agents'’....

Governments in developed countries aim to increase the market share of organic products as a possibility to improve the environment or animal welfare or as a reaction to food crises and changing consumer preferences. Assuming that organic farming creates a positive externality, we address the...