The measurement of farm economic sustainability has received intermittent academic interest in recent times, while the\ud conceptual discussions are often quite limited. Moreover, this concept receives more attention at periods of difficulty for the\ud sector. The measurement of farm viability is an important precondition to enrich these discussions. Therefore, it is necessary to\ud develop more comprehensive and detailed measurement techniques to provide more clarity on viability and vulnerability levels\ud in the sector. This paper refocuses attention on this issue, using a pilot dataset collected at farm level across a range of EU\ud Member States which facilitates the assessment of an additional category of viability, namely that of economically sustainable\ud farms, i.e. farms that are economically vulnerable but which are deemed sustainable by the presence of off-farm income. Differences\ud in viability and economic sustainability across the eight surveyed Member States are shown. The analysis is sensitive\ud to the factors included in the measurement of viability as well as to the threshold income used to define viability. Although this\ud is a pilot study, it enhances our understanding of the factors affecting cross-country evaluation of viability and sustainability,\ud and the policy instruments that could improve viability levels

The COVID‐19 emergency has had a dramatic impact on market incomes and income‐support policies. The lack of timely available data constrains the estimation of the scale and direction of recent changes in the income distribution, which in turn constrains policymakers seeking to monitor such developments. We overcome the lack of data by proposing a dynamic calibrated microsimulation approach to generate counterfactual income distributions as a function of more timely external data than are available in dated income surveys. We combine nowcasting methods using publicly available data and a household income generation model to perform the first calibrated simulation based upon actual data, aiming to assess the distributional implications of the COVID‐19 crisis in Ireland. Overall, we find that the crisis had an equalizing real‐time effect for both gross and disposable incomes, notwithstanding the significant hardship experienced by many households.

We evaluate the COVID-19 resilience of a Continental welfare regime by nowcasting the implications of the shock and its associated policy responses on the distribution of household incomes over the whole of 2020. Our approach relies on a dynamic microsimulation modelling that combines a household income generation model estimated on the latest EU-SILC wave with novel nowcasting techniques to calibrate the simulations using external macro controls which reflect the macroeconomic climate during the crisis. We focus on Luxembourg, a country that introduced minor tweaks to the existing tax-benefit system, which has a strong social insurance focus that gave certainty during the crisis. We find the system was well-equipped ahead of the crisis to cushion household incomes against job losses. The income-support policy changes were effective in cushioning household incomes and mitigating an increase in income inequality, allowing average household disposable income and inequality levels to bounce back to pre-crisis levels in the last quarter of 2020. The share of labour incomes dropped, but was compensated by an increase in benefits, reflecting the cushioning effect of the transfer system. Overall market incomes dropped and became more unequal. Their disequalizing evolution was matched by an increase in redistribution, driven by an increase in the generosity of benefits and larger access to benefits. The nowcasting model is a “near” real-time analysis and decision support tool to monitor the recovery, scalable to other countries with high applicability for policymakers.

Human activity has led to degradation of the natural environment, with far-reaching impacts for society and the economy, sparking new conceptual framings for how people interact with, and depend upon, the environment. The bioeconomy and natural capital concepts both blend economics and natural sciences and propose new interdisciplinary, environmental sustainability framings. Despite this similarity, the two concepts are rarely applied together. This paper applies a natural capital lens to the bioeconomy at three different levels: environmental sustainability framings; experts’ principles for a sustainable bioeconomy; and a case study of EU policy. We first construct an integrated cascade model that combines the unrealised potential of bioresources alongside unrecognised environmental services that tend to be systematically undervalued or ignored. Subsequently, we present five cornerstones identified from the sustainable bioeconomy-related literature from a natural capital perspective and highlight avenues of complementarity. The paper concludes with a policy case study of the EU Bioeconomy Strategy through a natural capital lens. There is evidence that the EU strategy has become increasingly aligned with the natural capital concept, but there is scope for further integration. The natural capital concept and related toolbox is an asset for the future bioeconomy to ensure it meets its environmentally sound and ecologically conscious objectives.