Organic EprintsModeling the Impacts of Policy on Entry into Organic Farming: Evidence from Danish-UK Comparisons, 1989-2007.DaugbjergauthorHollowayauthorTranterauthorThis paper analyzes organic farming entry decisions using a novel, missing-data methodology and a piece-wise linear depiction of policy. Our primary goal is to ascertain, from the available but limited information, whether Danish and UK policy measures toward organic agriculture have had discernible impacts on participation. Despite considerable interest in the growth of organic farming, both regionally and globally, there has been little systematic analysis of such phenomena. Whilst analyses of organic farming policy instruments have provided extensive and detailed reviews of instruments applied, generally speaking, the spirit of those enquiries takes as datum that organic policies have had the desired impacts. Yet such conjectures remain mostly untested. Hence, there is a need to examine systematically whether there exist relationships between the introduction of organic farming policies and the growth of the organic food sector, and whether particular organic farming policy measures are more effective than others. In this paper, we take a first step in this endeavor by undertaking an econometric analysis of the relationship between organic farming policies in Denmark and the UK during the period 1989-2007. Using two response variables – the numbers of farmers and growers converting to organic production and the total land area under organic conversion – we implement a simple, though robust, Bayesian methodology which accounts formally for several idiosyncrasies of the sample, including missing observations in the response variables and the stepwise-linear impacts of policy. The Bayesian methodology evidences routine implementation of recent advances in Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods – Gibbs sampling and data augmentation, in particular – and leads to robust inferences about the nature and extent of the impacts of policy on entry into organic agriculture. Extensions are discussed (276 words). "Organics" in general2008Journal paper

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