A levy on nitrogen fertilizer is evaluated, using real life experiences in Austria, Finland and Sweden until 1995. In these countries such a levy system was introduced in 1986, 1976 and 1985, respectively. Rates varied from between 10% and 72% of the price of fertilizer. Price elasticity in...

Direct payments are the most important expenditure of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). They are mostly spent on decoupled direct payments which are intended to be allocatively neutral. Increasing volumes of such transfers imply that distributive aspects of CAP expenditures become more...

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...

Consistent with proposals provided by the OECD, the practice of linking the Common Agricultural Policy with agricultural production was abandoned after the 2003 reform. Another substantial change was expected from the 2013 reform. In line with the OECD principle, the provision of public goods...

The future GAP structures for 2014 and beyond are more difficult to forecast than was the case in earlier reforms of a comparable scale. The main obstacles are the worrying problems of EU countries at the macroeconomic level, together with the greater role that the European Parliament is now...

Direct payments are the most important expenditure of the Common Agricultural Policy. They are mostly in the form of decoupled direct payments which are intended to be allocatively neutral. Increasing volumes of such transfers imply that distributive aspects of CAP expenditures become more...

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has evolved from an allocative towards a dis-tributive policy. Distributive policies aim at correcting market outcomes according to politi-cally determined objectives usually through transferring money from richer to poorer house-holds. We compare the...