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Effective design of agricultural policies requires an understanding of the drivers behind the evolution of the agricultural sector. This project builds an evolutionary economic model of the Belgian agricultural sector, as a testing ground for new policies. This agent-based model simulates the dairy, cow and pig sector. The model is calibrated to historical data of production and farm diversity during the period 2003 – 2013. Profit maximising agents cannot replicate the historical trends. When assuming heterogeneous behaviours, the actual evolution can be reproduced much more closely. The calibration reveals key behaviour variables. The evolution in the agricultural sector can only be explained when accounting for a resistance to change at farm level or at market level. However, this approach cannot determine the exact location of this resistance. The resistance to change can result from personal convictions of the farmer or from market rigidities and learning effects.

ispartof: pages:1-200 status: Published online

Deep geothermal energy appears to be currently on the edge of a take-off in Belgium. However, the actual emergence of this technology is subject to developments in legislation and incentives from regional governments. Different risk/return expectations across stages of the investment continuum exist and the financial structures that are employed at each stage may require different types of public support. In this context, the ALPI project aims at developing a geological-economic model to calculate the impact of different policy instruments on development of the Belgian geothermal energy sector. Due to the lack of underground information describing the Campine Basin, economic methods are used to deal with these large geological uncertainties.

European Union (Grant agreement no: 635577); H2020-SFS-2014-2; SUFISA

Environmental economic models often integrate economic parameters such as labour and capital with physical parameters such as energy, emissions or materials. These models show both market behaviour and effects on the environment. A central instrument is the particular production function that relates inputs to outputs. However, the characteristic behaviour of matter and energy is subject to different constraints than the behaviour of labour and capital. Very few economic production functions take that difference into account. This project develops a new economic production function for micro-economic modelling, based on a maximum installed capacity of transformation. Following economic and physical constraints of production functions, an algebraic form is derived. It is tested with a case-study. Secondly the modelling behaviour is compared to a standard function.

Industry is confronted with systemic environmental problems such as limited fossil resources, sustainability concerns of renewable resources, toxicity of end products and waste accumulation. This triggers the pursuit of new processes and business models. New pathways are being developed. For instance, the agro-industrial and chemical sector define pathways including biorefineries, material production from organic waste and sustainable chemistry. The current research investigates policy options in this respect. The interactions within these innovative industrial systems are becoming almost exclusively governed by natural processes. These processes being subjected to nature’s principles, one can see these new installations as a particular extension of the surrounding ecosystem itself, rather than an artificial industrial economic system. This allows the methodology to start from an energy and material balance analysis of the entire ecosystem, including the industrial process. Several authors assess the energy and material efficiency of ecosystems and living organisms in terms of exergy. (Jorgensen and Svirezhev, 2004) Similar methodologies asses the efficiency of industrial processes in terms of exergy or exergy cost. (Szargut, 2005; Valero et al., 1986). Various applications have further developed the method by integrating all major environmental effects in the equation and linking industrial life cycle analysis with the input from ecosystems. (Dewulf et al., 2007). Based on these developments, we propose a methodology to assess the exergy cost of the industrial output starting from the ecosystem it is related to. This is compared to the economic cost and value of the same industrial outputs. Through a life cycle perspective, the methodology compares both natural value and economic value-creation of an innovative industrial process. Built on value assessment and total factor productivity analysis, we delimit the steps to assess these values on an equal basis. The methodology is applied to a case study. The results show the potentials and limitations of such a methodology. For instance, the choice of the ecosystem interacting with the process is of high importance. But also the contribution of ecosystem services requires more research. TUL-Impuls program

Highlights •Biomass resource constraints impact the effectiveness of bioeconomy policies. •Bioeconomy policies may have an important impact on the sector structure in the long run, but the sector growth remains ultimately constrained by the availability of inputs. •Solutions to reduce the biomass constraint have to be included in innovation policy for the biobased economy.

Het aantal structurele files in België was nooit hoger dan in 2015. Deze files zorgen op hun beurt voor een grote economische schade en brengen tal van ecologische gevolgen met zich mee. Een kilometerheffing voor personenwagens wordt meer en meer gezien als een middel om deze congestie en de daarmee gepaard gaande problemen te reduceren. Deze masterproef onderzoek bovendien of een kilometerheffing die geheven zal worden op benzine- en dieselwagens het gebruik van milieuvriendelijke elektrische wagens kan verhogen. Deze invloed wordt onderzocht aan de hand van een partiële evenwichtsanalyse. Uit de resultaten blijkt alvast dat de invoering van een kilometerheffing zal zorgen voor een sterke toename van het aantal elektrische wagens en een bijna evenredige daling van het aantal dieselwagens in België. Deze analyse is wel enkel bedoeld om een eerste indruk te krijgen van de mogelijke marktverschuivingen die zog zouden voordoen bij de invoering van een kilometerheffing. Omdat de uitkomst waarschijnlijk sterk onderhevig is aan de gemaakte assumpties en de gebruikte kosten zal extra onderzoek noodzakelijk zijn om de uitkomsten van dit onderzoek te generaliseren.