Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
justify CAP support as a compensation for the provision of public goods and land
management by farmers in LFA regions.
Concluding Remarks
In this chapter we explored whether the economic and environmental performance
of farms is affected by regional characteristics. We used farm intensity - measured as
agricultural output per hectare - as an indicator for the economic and environmental
performance of farms. Regional characteristics were captured by three regional
typologies. In particular, we considered three hypotheses:
1. Farming in rural regions tends to be less intensive than farming in urban
regions.
2. Farming in regions with a relatively high share of employment in agriculture
tends to be less intensive than farming in regions with a relatively low share of
employment in agriculture.
3. Farming in LFA tends to be less intensive than farming in non-LFA.
Drawbacks of Typologies at a Relatively High Regional
Aggregation Level
In order to test these hypotheses, we used data on farm intensity from the FADN.
A drawback of these data is that they are only available at a relatively high regional
aggregation level. As a consequence, our typologies of rural and urban regions,
regions with a high and low share of employment in agriculture, and LFA
and non-LFA regions were designed also at a relatively high regional aggregation
level. It has to be recognized that by doing so less optimal typologies emerge,
as socio-economic and natural differences within regions are averaged out. A second
drawback of this relatively high regional aggregation level is that we were
not able to test the hypotheses in Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, The
Netherlands and Austria, as the FADN regions coincide with the national level in
these Member States.
Wide Support for Hypothesis (2) and (3)
An overview of the results of the tested hypotheses in the nine EU15 Member
States is presented in Table
8.6
. From our analysis, it appears that hypotheses
