The Role of Pluriactivity in Farm Exit and Labour Supply Decisions. Factor Markets Working Document No. 67, August 2013

EDITED VERSION TO BE PUBLISHED SOON Pluriactivity has been a topic of research in agriculture for the best part of a century. It is a term which has both broad and narrow definitions and hence is subject to multiple interpretations. This paper considers two forms of pluriactivity: within the farm gate pluriactivity, also commonly referred to as farm diversification, and beyond the farm-gate pluriactivity, also known as multiple job holding. Previous studies of pluriactivity have shown that it can inhibit the natural process of structural change in the farm sector, by allowing small and unprofitable farms to survive with the support of income from outside the sector. In this paper, two empirical models of pluriactivity are estimated using farm level data for Ireland. The first examines the impact of on-farm diversification on off-farm labour supply, while the second investigates the relationship between off-farm labour supply and farm exit which is specified in the context of retirement and non-succession. The result of the first model suggests that farms that engage in within the farm gate pluriactivity are less likely to engage in beyond the farm gate pluriactivity, in other words more diversified farmers are less likely to work off farm. The second model confirms previous findings in the literature that part-time farmers have a reduced probability of having a farm successor. While the model results are specific to the Irish case, they do provide some value insights into the impacts of pluriactivity on structural change in farming.

The genesis of EC environmental principles. Research Paper in Law 7/2003

[From the Introduction]. The EC Treaty in its present version contains a number of environmental principles. The following contribution will try to retrace the origins of these principles in the EC Treaty and how they were developed by the EC institutions and in particular by the Commission. This discussion concerns the principles of integration[1], prevention[2] and precaution[3], the principle that environmental damage should as a priority be rectified at source[4] and the polluter-pays principle[ 5].

R&D, Spillovers, Innovation Systems and the Genesis of Regional Growth in Europe. Bruges European Economic Research (BEER) Papers 5/October 2006

Research on the impact of innovation on regional economic performance in Europe has fundamentally followed three approaches: a) the analysis of the link between investment in R&D, patents, and economic growth; b) the study of the existence and efficiency of regional innovation systems; and c) the examination of geographical diffusion of regional knowledge spillovers. These complementary approaches have, however, rarely been combined. Important operational and methodological barriers have thwarted any potential cross-fertilization. In this paper, we try to fill this gap in the literature by combining in one model R&D, spillovers, and innovation systems approaches. A multiple regression analysis is conducted for all regions of the EU-25, including measures of R&D investment, proxies for regional innovation systems, and knowledge and socio-economic spillovers. This approach allows us to discriminate between the influence of internal factors and external knowledge and institutional flows on regional economic growth. The empirical results highlight how the interaction between local and external research with local and external socioeconomic and institutional conditions determines the potential of every region in order to maximise its innovation capacity. They also indicate the importance of proximity for the transmission of economically productive knowledge, as spillovers show strong distance decay effects. In the EU-25 context, only the innovative efforts pursued within a 180 minute travel radius have a positive and significant impact on regional growth performance.