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The Common Agricultural Policy reform 2013–2020 has conditioned 30 per cent of the direct payments to greening requirements. Our study investigates whether one of these requirements, the ecological focus area (EFA) obligation, has led to environmental improvements while preserving farms' economic sustainability. We apply a regression discontinuity design approach on a sample of Italian arable crop farms. Our results suggest that the EFA requirement has no significant effects on farms' application of fertilisers, pesticide expenditure, crop diversification or economic performance. However, farmers reacted to the EFA requirement by changing their crop mix, mostly by increasing their share of leguminous crops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of the European Union common agricultural policy direct payments on land prices has received substantial attention in recent years, leading to heterogeneous evidence of capitalisation for both coupled and decoupled payments. In this paper, we provide an extensive review of the empirical works addressing this issue econometrically and compare their results through a Bayesian meta-regression model, focussing on the impact of decoupling and its implementation schemes. We find that the introduction of decoupled payments increased the capitalisation rate, although the extent of this increment hinges on the implementation scheme adopted by the member state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the socio-demographic structure of population are considered a determinant of trends in consumption. We estimated a complete demand system for Italy, with emphasis on food demand, using a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS) with demographic effects. Our results allow comparison of expenditure elasticities and shares across households, thereby providing insights into the structure of food demand in Italy and confirming that demographic characteristics play a significant role. The QUAIDS specification is superior to the Almost Ideal Demand System specification: this is important, especially if the model is used for simulation and/or forecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The hypothesis of direct weak separability of the transformation function places fewer restrictions on production technology than those deriving from alternative multi-stage procedures, based on indirect separability assumptions. We derive an explicit form of the necessary and sufficient conditions for direct weak separability in the multiple output case. These conditions are expressed in elasticity terms, so they can be readily maintained or tested in commonly used flexible functional forms. Parametric restrictions are derived for the multioutput translog profit function. The procedure is applied to the Italian agricultural sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]