EU agri-environmental programs and the "restaurant table effect"

The share of agricultural area enrolled in EU agri-environmental programs varies significantly between EU member states. These national differences are explained, based on a model that reflects both, that these programs internalize externalities and the political economy. We identify six factors that affect the extent to which agri-environmental programs are implemented: environmental benefits, opportunity costs of participation, budgetary pressure, the share of program expenditures financed by the EU, the political weight attributed to farmers at the national, and the political influence of each country at the EU level. In addition, we demonstrate that, if the policy decision-making process is noncooperative at the EU level, countries that contribute less to the EU budget will ceteris paribus implement more programs. Using data of four years and feasible generalized least square methods, we are able to confirm our theoretical results including a noncooperative behavior of EU member states.     

R&D decision support by parallel assessment of economic, ecological and social impact — Adipic acid from renewable resources versus adipic acid from crude oil

The concept of eco-efficiency has largely been applied along these years. This study proposes the earlier application of this concept, namely the R&D stage of a product. Together with the economic and ecological assessment, the social impacts were analysed in the production of adipic acid from renewable resources. Conventional adipic acid based on crude oil served as a benchmark. The work was carried out within the frame of the EU funded project BIOFOAM. The ecological aspects were addressed in the Life Cycle Perspective by performing a Life Cycle Assessment. The economic impacts were assessed by the application of the Life Cycle Costing under a ‘total production cost’ perspective. In this case, the addressee is interested in several steps of the value chain, but only of the steps that are related to the consortium as a single player in the value chain. The Life Cycle Working Environment method was used to assess the social impacts. Data sources were based on the project consortium, literature and statistics. Despite of the fact that the conventional routes still outperform the new bio-source based adipic acid, the application of this methodology has shown as successful way of identifying problem fields and paving further research.     

National and International Benefit Transfer Testing with a Rigorous Test Procedure

Benefit transfer, as a mean to transfer values from existing monetary valuation studies to new policy sites, has been in use for many years. This paper aims to analyze the forecasting quality of benefit transfer by applying a rigoroust-test – also referred to as Accuracy-t-test – that takes into account testing errors which were made in previous surveys. Beside the analysis of national benefit transfers based on two German contingent valuation studies additional efforts were made to investigate into the validity and accuracy of international benefit transfer by considering two Norwegian studies that employed a similar survey design.