No abstract

Agricultural land use in Europe has changed considerably in the last decades. However, our understanding of agricultural land use changes, especially changes in land use intensity, is limited because the evidence is fragmented. This paper presents a systematic review of case study evidence on manifestations and underlying drivers for agricultural land use change in Europe. We analyzed 137 studies that together report on 76 cases of intensification and 143 cases of disintensification. Observed changes were manifested as expansion or contraction of agricultural land as well as in changes of land management intensity, landscape elements, agricultural land use activity, and specialization/diversification. Economic, technological, institutional and location factors were frequently identified as underlying drivers, while demographic drivers and sociocultural drivers were mentioned less often. In addition, we found that farmers were very important as moderators between underlying drivers and manifestations of agricultural land use change. Farmer decisions differed between different farmer types, and according to their characteristics and attitudes. We found major land use change trajectories in relation to globalization of agricultural markets, the transition from a rural to an urban society, and the shift to post-socialism in central and eastern Europe.

Abstract.Promoting investments in energy saving technologies is an important means for achieving environmental goals. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence on success conditions of policies is scarce. Based on a survey among Dutch firms, this paper sets out to identify the factors that determine the investment behaviour of firms, their attitude towards various types of energy policy, and their responsiveness to changes in environmental policy in the Netherlands. On the basis of discrete choice models, this paper aims to investigate empirically whether (and how) these strategic features vary over firm characteristics and over sectors. JEL-codes: D20, Q40, Q48

Abstract

We are grateful to an anonymous referee of this journal for useful and stimulating comments on an earlier version of this paper. Furthermore, we thank Silvia Stiller and participants of the ERSA 2003 conference for comments on an earlier draft.

The topic of convergence is at the heart of a wide-ranging debate in the growth literature, and empirical studies of convergence differ widely in their theoretical backgrounds, empirical specifications, and in their treatment of cross-sectional heterogeneity. Despite these differences, a rate of convergence of about 2% has been found under a variety of different conditions, resulting in the widespread belief that the rate of convergence is a natural constant. We use meta-analysis to investigate whether there is substance to the 'myth' of the 2% convergence rate and to assess several unresolved issues of interpretation and estimation. Our data set contains approximately 600 estimates taken from a random sample of empirical growth studies published in peer-reviewed journals.The results indicate that it is misleading to speak of a natural convergence rate since estimates of different growth regressions come from different populations, and we find that correcting for the bias resulting from unobserved heterogeneity in technology levels leads to higher estimates of the rate of convergence. We also find that correcting for endogeneity of the explanatory variables has a substantial effect on the estimates and that measures of financial and fiscal development are important determinants of long-run differences in per capita income levels. We show that although the odds of a study being published is not uniform for studies with different p-values, publication bias has no significant effect on the conclusions of the analysis.

Structural Funds are the most intensively used policy instrument by the European Union to promote economic growth in its member states and to speed up the process of convergence. This paper empirically explores the effectiveness of European Structural Funds by means of a panel data analysis for 13 countries in the European Union. We show that - on average - Structural Funds are ineffective. For countries with a 'proper' institutional framework, however, Structural Funds are effective. The latter result is obtained for a wide range of conditioning variables, such as openness, institutional quality, corruption and indicators for good governance. It is robust to a wide range of robustness tests. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

No abstract