The European Commission is currently considering the introduction of income stabilisation tools as a means of stabilising farmers’ incomes throughout the European Union. One of the options is to use mutual insurance schemes. The objectives of this paper are to analyse the performance of mutual...

The paper analyses the impact that European Union (EU) farmers’ and rural population’s awareness of biotechnology innovations and access to/trust in information on these issues (amongst other a priori determinants) have on their perceptions of risks and benefits of the applications of...

Recently, the European Commission proposed to introduce several risk management tools in the rural development pillar 2 of the CAP. One of them consists in providing co-financing support to mutual funds compensating farmers who experience a severe drop in their farm income. This paper analyses...

One of the goals of geographical indications in the EU is to contribute to rural development of remote and less-favoured areas. On the base of a rough estimation of the uptake of geographical indications in mountain and island areas of the EU, it can be concluded that indeed agricultural and...

During the process of the budgetary review the CAP faces its greatest challenge of its history: not only the (common) financing of the CAP, but the future of the CAP itself is at stake. It is obvious that the reform steps implemented so far – even though they have several forward-looking...

New 2007-13 planning framework of the EU keeps using economic criteria (GDP) to identify those regions requiring priority attention (convergence objective). Although these criteria are useful for the overall Regional Policy, nevertheless it might result some planning failures of the strategies...

The status of competitiveness for the two most important food and beverage manufacturing sector s (meat processing and beverage manufacturing) in 13 EU countries is analysed empirically, using 1995 - 2002 Eurostat data. After a review of earlier agribusiness competitiveness studies an industial...

This paper provides an overview of the European Union component of the recently developed ERS/Penn State WTO Model. The model is a multi-region, multi-commodity partial equilibrium trade model which allows the user to simulate the effects of reducing or eliminating tariffs and TRQs, export...

I develop a two-stage political economy model that explicitly models the complexity of decision-making in the European Union on the Common Agricultural Policy, and I derive how the institutional design affects the outcome and the influence of the various agents involved, and the likelihood of...