Research Hypothesis: an economically and methodologically justified implementation of land consolidation can improve the spatial structure of agricultural holdings and foster the use of land in Latvia’s rural areas. Research Aim to test the hypothesis: to assess the need for the implementation of land consolidation in Latvia’s rural areas in order to develop a land consolidation conception aimed at improving the spatial structure of agricultural holdings.

Agriculture and forestry play an important role in emitting and storing greenhouse gases. For an efficient and cost-effective climate policy it is therefore important to explicitly include land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) in economy-climate models. This paper gives an overview and assessment of existing approaches to include land use, land-use change, and forestry into climate-economy models or to link economy-climate models to land-use models.

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 parameters for the one period returns and transition equations. The optimal decision rules for liming are solved numerically, conditional on alternative scenarios on the likelihood that the lease contract and, thus, farmer access to land is either renewed or expired. The model parameters represent Finnish soil quality and production conditions.

This presentation provides comparative analysis of agricultural holdings in Estonia based on the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) data. The FADN data for reference years 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003 have been analysed. The FADN data analyses showed, that there are very big differences in the structure of the agricultural holdings. Individual farms represent ca 92% of the total population of agricultural producers but at the same time their part in total production attains less than 50% according to the FADN data for year 2003.

Controlling Russian knapweed with an integrated system of herbicide followed by seeding perennial grass is profitable in yielding an 8.7% average rate of return, and repaying the establishment costs in approximately six years. Moreover, the system is sustainable by exploiting plant competition and eliminating herbicide usage in later years.

We estimate a system-of-equations model designed to measure the interaction between intertemporal patterns of changes in population, employment, and agricultural land densities. The model is applied to West Virginia for the 1990-1999 period. Consistent with recent findings on migration patterns, the results show that jobs followed people. New jobs were captured by commuters, while agricultural land losses were occurring in the commuters' counties of origin or bedroom communities.