Development and Policy Environment for Organic Farming in Europe

The paper describes the development and policy environment of organic farming in the European Union, where organic farming has grown rapidly due to a variety of factors. Policy measures concerning area-based financial support for conversion to and continuation of organic farming, officially-recognized standards and support for market and regional development, advice and research are considered. This indicates that individual measures can also work against each other. In some countries, good experiences have been made with integrated action plans, an approach that is also being discussed at the European level and which could achieve a good basis for the development of organic farming in future

Agentenbasierte Politik- und Sektoranalyse - Perspektiven und Herausforderungen

Agent-based Policy and Sector Analysis - Perspectives and ChallengesDuring the last decade a new modeling approach, known as agent-based modeling, was developed and made its way into several areas of research. It greatly benefited from rapid developments in computing technology. As for economics, agent-based modeling is based on the observation that social systems can be understood and modeled explicitly as systems of interacting agents. Because of their flexibility with respect to the representation of agents, the interactions between agents as well as the resulting dynamic and spatial relationships, these models offer a great variety of perspectives for future research. In this contribution, the underlying modeling concept is presented, and exemplary applications to the field of sector and policy analysis are discussed. Future perspectives of agent-based modeling are pointed out, but also challenges to the agent-based approach are presented

Estimating expenditure and price elasticities of food commodities using German cross-sectional household data

This study presents a procedure to estimate expenditure and price elasticities of food commodities from cross-sectional data. There are two problems with the use of cross-sectional data: First, price-information is not sufficient in these data. To derive "adjusted prices" from cross-sectional data an approach of COX and WOHLGENANT is applied. Second, zero expenditures for some commodity groups can be observed. To avoid selectivity bias a generalization of the HECKMAN procedure is employed. Both, the adjusted prices and the bias correction are included in a Linear Expenditure System. It can be concluded that expenditure and price elasticities could differ significantly between household characteristics. The research results suggest that attempts to use only the mean elasticity coefficient as a description of consumer behaviour without regarding the variances between households might be not appropriate

50 Jahre Agrarwirtschaft

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