H41 - Public GoodsReturn

Subsidy to less favoured area (LFA) farms is central to rural development policy in the European Union. Here, three categories of LFA support are assessed: farm competitiveness measures, LFA measures, and agri-environment measures. These categories of measures are complementary to safeguarding land management and delivering ecosystem benefits. Based on historical data for the Czech Republic, this paper endeavours to illustrate potential methods for assessing the LFA subsidies. In sum, rigorous methods to evaluate LFA evidence are still at their very starting point, even as they are necessary in order to ascertain the Community's capability, alongside the local, regional, or national institutional capability. A positive trend has been identified with regard to  stabilizing the available rural development budget for the policy priority "Restoring, preserving and enhancing agroecosystems".

Voluntary contribution mechanism to public goods is one of the traditional types of economic experiments. The article summarizes the results of series of experiments that have been conducted with several groups of Czech university students. Using the threshold mechanism the impact of several factors (experience, communication and the form of experiment) on voluntary contribution to public goods is tested. The results confirm, to a great extent, findings published by foreign studies. The results show that Czech students also do not behave consistently with the traditional economic public goods model, i.e. they cooperate voluntarily in situations that favour free riding. Threshold is a traditional part of (mostly American) charitable collections and can be regarded as one of the most successful modifications of the voluntary contribution mechanism to public good. Experiments involving Czech students indicate that such technique can be successful even in Czech non-profit sector.