The present report covers an exercise where a defined development approach has been tested in a case study area with rural cross border setting in the Western Balkans. The aim is to draw lessons both for continuing implementation of the ABD in this particular area and more generally initiating...

With a view to making the mountain products on the market more clearly identifiable and less misleading for consumers, the EU institutions legislated on a common definition of an optional quality term, 'mountain product', in the labelling of agricultural products. The term 'mountain product'...

As the recent situation on world food markets has been increasingly volatile and has been associated with relatively higher food prices, contributing to demonstrations and riots across the world, Russia's agriculture has attracted much attention from economists, experts and policy-makers because...

Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world that is in a position to significantly increase grain net exports, due to its strategic location and agro-ecological potential of its soils. The grain production potential of Ukraine depends on the two main factors: land area cultivated and yield....

The European Union's Regional Policy and Common Agricultural Policy share a common objective of balanced regional development; in practice, they are implemented in very distinct ways as regional policies mainly focus their strategy on urban development while the CAP Pillar 2 is based on a...

Social capital matters in determining a person’s or a family’s material well-being. It is argued that social capital functions similar to the traditional production factors. However, there are not many empirical analyses looking into this hypothesis at the farm-household level in...

In this paper we develop a partial equilibrium model for agricultural sector to assess the impact of CEE integration with the EU on welfare and income distribution of agricultural factors. The modelling framework is based on the concept of market imperfections and transaction costs. We perform...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic importance of credit rationing and whether banks use characteristics such as ownership structure and institutional type of borrowers in order to regulate the risk of loaned funds. To test this, monthly data for 2000–2002, extracted from the National...

This paper uses a model with transaction costs and imperfect competition in the land market to analyze the efficiency and welfare effects of land reforms. We show that removing only one imperfection may have very different efficiency and welfare effects than would otherwise result from reforms...