Efficient agricultural water management is indispensable in meeting future food demands. The European Water Framework Directive promotes several measures such as the adoption of adequate water pricing mechanisms or the promotion of water-saving irrigation technologies. We apply a stochastic...

The Austrian agricultural sector is very heterogeneous in natural conditions and farming systems and highly vulnerable to climate change (e.g. alpine farming). The economic assessment of climate change impacts on and adaptation measures for agriculture requires an integrated modeling approach to...

Agricultural price volatility has moved to the forefront of research efforts and political discussion, where much work is already being undertaken with respect to the impact of fluctuations in input prices (e.g. fertilizer, feed and energy). In this paper we also want to take into account the...

The introduction of decoupled direct payments in the EU was a substantial change of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2003. After decoupling direct payments from production, it has become evident that distributional objectives are the major justification of farm payments. There are three...

A core element of the recent Common Agricultural Policy reform is to decouple payments that are merely linked to production from 2005 on. These subsidies are classified as environmentally harmful by OECD. An agricultural sector model, using a modified version of the positive mathematical...

Agriculture and forestry produce biomass which is increasingly utilised for energy generation, because its use, through substituting for fossil fuels, improves supply security and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. At present, the prevailing use for timber is to generate heat in private...

Organic farming practices have environmental benefits compared to conventional ones. Their adoption is the result of a complex interaction of intrinsic attitudes of farmers, their profit expectations and farm policy incentives. We use an agricultural sector model and develop an extended version...