German agriculture exhibits persistent income problems. While larger farms are on average quite profitable, this is consistently not true for the majority of part-time and small- and medium-sized family farms. These farms are particularly prominent in the southern and western parts of Germany...

Die Landwirtschaft steht derzeit unter der besonderen Herausforderung, sich zugleich einer wachsenden gesellschaftlichen Kritik an modernen, zunehmend großbetrieblichen Produktionsweisen zu stellen als auch die Möglichkeiten weiteren technologischen Fortschritts zu realisieren, um im...

More powerful computers, the better availability of micro-data, and the development of new modeling techniques, such as multi-agent systems, allows to analyze agricultural policies from the bottom up. We present such an approach that considers the spatial interaction of thousands of individually...

Infolge der Veränderungen der politischen, wirtschaftlichen und rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen hat sich in der ostdeutschen Landwirtschaft ein erheblicher Strukturwandel vollzogen. Zwar ist die Zahl der landwirtschaftlichen Unternehmen infolge von Neugründungen, Teilungen und Auslagerungen von...

The submitted paper is discussing the role of labour in the restructuring process of agricultural enterprises as apart of the transition process towards a market economy. A concept for the measurement of lacks in efficiency is formulated on the background of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)....

Agricultural markets often feature significant transport costs and spatially distributed production and processing which causes spatial imperfect competition. Spatial economics considers the firms’ decisions regarding location and spatial price strategy separately, usually on the demand side,...

Although important, the spatial dimension is often neglected in studies of market power and competition in agricultural markets. This paper investigates spatial competition for raw milk between dairies under the presence of marketing cooperatives. Since observed in reality, our model is based on...