This Athens Workshop helped to illustrate what needs to be done to manage water sustainably in agriculture, in particular through reviewing the experiences in OECD countries.

This book is the first comprehensive study to review and take stock in OECD countries of progress in developing indicators to measure the environmental performance of agriculture.

This two-volume set provides a description and evaluation of overall agricultural policy developments in OECD countries as well as detailed background tables, which include data from 1986-88 to 1997, and information on policy developments.

This annual publication provides the most comprehensive monitoring and evaluation of agricultural policies available for OECD countries. It examines the changing level and composition of support to agriculture, evaluating agricultural policy developments against a set of OECD principles for reform.

Explores how agricultural policy can be designed to not only serve agricultural and economic objectives, but also environmental ones.

This analysis clarifies the concept of multifunctionality and establishes a common analytical framework and terminology for it.

Explores how both governments and the private sector can expand the role of markets to allocate water used by all sectors and to get agricultural producers to account for the pollution that their sector generates.

Nature and agriculture both shape the European countryside and one of the main challenges for the years to come will be to strengthen their interaction for the future development of rural areas. In this valuable and highly topical book, the authors demonstrate how economics and ecology can play a critical role in maintaining and sustaining this relationship. The book identifies the dilemmas facing European agriculture and explores their economic and ecological consequences. The authors believe a better understanding of these problems will be crucial in recognising the potential options for the future role of agriculture and nature policy and will guide the identification of suitable policy instruments. They highlight current threats to the relationship between agriculture and nature - such as abandonment and intensification - and demonstrate how these problems can be resolved by a rational policy mix. The book also provides extensive empirical evidence from four case studies and concludes by scrutinising the major changes in market conditions and the Common Agricultural Policy which could upset this important but fragile balance between agriculture and nature.

Much hope has been vested in pricing as a means of helping to regulate and rationalize water management, notably in the irrigation sector. The pricing of water has often been applied universally, using general and ideological policies, and not considering regional environmental and economic differences. Almost 15 years after the emphasis laid at the Dublin and Rio conferences on treating water as an economic good, a comprehensive review of how such policies have helped manage water resources an irrigation use is necessary. The case-studies presented here offer a reassessment of current policies by evaluating their objectives and constraints and often demonstrating their failure by not considering the regional context. They will therefore contribute to avoiding costly and misplaced reforms and help design water policies that are based on a deeper understanding of the factors which eventually dictate their effectiveness.

This volume presents recent developments in designing and implementing environmental taxes in China and OECD countries.