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...

On the 26th of June 2003 an agreement was reached by farm ministers to reform the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU. Decoupling direct payments from farm output and the reduction of administrative prices are core elements of this reform. The goals of the reform are less output of cereals,...

We analyse whether the 2003 CAP reform and the anticipated new program of rural development will lead to an expansion or a reduction of organic farming. An extended version of the Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) method is developed in order to differentiate organic farming from...

The expansion of renewable energy sources is an EU strategy to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels and to curb carbon dioxide emission. According to studies estimating technical potentials, significant land resources can be mobilised for the production of energy crops. We estimate the costs of...

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...

This study uses a partial equilibrium model of the US agricultural sector to examine how technical progress and carbon price levels affect land management adaptation. We find that the climate policy range, over which a more extensive agriculture is preferred, decreases as crop yields increase....

In the continuous quest to reduce anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, the production and use of organically grown fuels in Europe has increased in importance in the recent past. However, the production of so-called biofuels is a direct competitor of agricultural food production for land,...

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...

Land use change and climate change are two major global modifications of our environment and are predicted to continue in the future. To assess how climate change affects land use and regional development in the Poyang Lake district in China, we use agent-based modeling and simulate the physical...