| Recently the importance of a comprehensive policy evaluation has been increasingly recognized by international organizations, e.g. the World Bank, OECD and FAO as well as especially by the EU. In particular, for agricultural policies of the second pillar a comprehensive evaluation is obligatory. However, presently applied evaluation techniques are clearly lagging behind the ambiguous evaluation targets set by the EU Commission. Given the fact that a comprehensive policy evaluation is a very complex methodological challenge this discrepancy is not really surprising. Thus, nowadays it is still fair to conclude that adequate evaluation tools applicable to EU rural development policies do not exist yet. In this context this paper derives microeconometric... |
