The ideal water contract for a heterogeneous population of users is a prioritized right that is fully vested and fully tradable. A set of tradable, prioritized rights contracts will span the same space as the Debreu contingent commodities. Therefore, they lead to a competitive equilibrium that is Pareto optimal. Equal sharing of water shortfalls does not have this property.Existing water policies in Israel and the Disputed Territories are not characterized by an efficient set of water contracts.

This paper presents econometric evidence of the effects of economic incentives and institutions on national aggregate private agricultural R&D investments. A model is proposed and fitted to annual data for seven European Union countries, 1984-1995. We find strong impacts of both incentives and institutions on private agricultural R&D investment, and including institutional factors strengthens the story and in some cases changes greatly the results. In particular, we reject the hypothesis that quality of property rights does not matter.

In the conditions of the Republic of Belarus there were presented theoretical statements and methodical approaches to the improvement of the use of lands and organization of the territory of agricultural organizations in conditions of ecologization of land use. There were formulated the notion and tasks of improvement of the use of lands of agricultural organizations.

To preserve the quality of surface water, official French regulations require farmers to keep a minimum acreage of grassland, especially bordering rivers. These agro-environmental measures do not account for the circulation of water within the catchment. This paper examines whether it is possible to design with the farmers agri-environmental measures at field and catchment scale to prevent soil erosion and surface water pollution.

Land means the basic part of the natural environment, the basic instrument of human life, activity and immovable property, which is being disposed of in the process of land relation. Land should be used when coordinating private and public interests as well as environment protection requirements.

In the turmoil of a rapidly changing economy the Albanian government needs accurate and timely information for management of their natural resources and formulation of land-use policies. The transformation of the forestry sector has required major changes in the legal, regulatory and management framework.

During the last two decades Indonesia has experienced immense forest and land fires. Often these fires are associated with extended drought and widespread use of fire to clear previously logged forest and other degraded land in preparation for oil palm, rubber, or pulpwood plantations. There are many reasons for the use of fire in land clearing activities, but probably the most important one is economics. There is still acceptance that fire is the cheapest, fastest, and most effective land clearing method with the added benefit of providing nutrients from ash residues.

This article solves and characterizes optimal decision rules to invest in irreversible land improvements conditional on land tenure insecurity. Economic model is a normative dynamic programming model with known parameter for the one period returns and transition equations. The decision rules are solved numerically conditional on alternative scenarios on the likelihood that the lease contract and, thus, farmer access to land is either renewed or expires. The model parameters represent Finnish soil quality and production conditions.

Although human-related disturbance is usually detrimental for biodiversity, in some instances it can simulate natural processes and benefit certain species. Changes in the disturbance regime, both natural and human-driven, can affect species that rely on it. The Apennine yellow-bellied toad Bombina variegata pachypus, an amphibian endemic to peninsular Italy, has declined throughout its range in the last 3 decades. We sought to identify the drivers of the decline in the region of Liguria, at the north-western limit of its distribution.

Attempts to estimate the allowable maximum population density is well known in the history of game management in Latvia. Relatively permanent environmental features (e. g. landscape and forest structure) have been used for the assessment of carrying capacity of hunting grounds. Amount of the available winter feed was considered as a limiting factor for major game species in each landscape unit and forest type. While focusing on the actual abundance of feed, many other factors, including mutual interaction among species and populations, were overlooked.