Meeting greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets will require a significant increase in electricity production from sustainable and renewable sources such as solar energy. Farmers have recognized this need as a chance to increase the profitability of their farms by allocating farmland to solar power production. However, the shift from agriculture to power production has many tradeoffs, arising primarily from alternative land uses and other means of production. This paper models the farmers’ decision as a constrained profit maximization problem, subject to the amount of land owned by the farmers, who have to allocate it between agriculture and solar power fields, while considering factors affecting production costs. The farmers’ problem is nested in the social welfare maximization problem, which includes additional factors such as ecological and aesthetical values of the competing land uses. Empirical analysis using data from a solar field operating in Israel shows that landowners will choose to have solar power production on their land unless agricultural production generates an unusually high net income. Adding the values of non-market services provided by agricultural land does not change this result. The consideration of the reduction in GHG emissions further increases the social welfare from solar fields.

This study explores differentiating factors in employment growth between young small and medium-sized enterprises in rural regions and their application in developing economies. We applied a mixed-method approach, including a survey of 155 new ventures in Israel, an economy whose rural regions exhibit similarities to those of less developed countries, and 10 in-depth interviews with academics and practitioners. The results suggest that the economic development of rural areas through the cultivation of entrepreneurship should be carried out by providing potential business owners with two resources that are scarcer in these areas: funding and knowledge.

OECD data show that in some countries the earnings of workers with tertiary vocational education are lower than those of workers with secondary education, in particular for the 25–34 years age group. Israel is one of those countries, and in this study we extend the analysis of this apparent anomaly using a quantitative methodology of multiple regression analysis and a survey of 699 SMEs through telephone interviews and a web-based questionnaire. We explored the employment growth rates of firms whose owners have secondary, academic and post-secondary vocational education. Findings show that compared to the base level of the owner’s secondary education, the growth of businesses whose owners have academic education is higher, while vocational education of the owner is associated with lower growth. These findings can be explained by the specific skills acquired through vocational training which may not adequately fit the changing job market and business ecosystem.

Global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and regional events like the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza have affected and still affect global supply chains, including those for food. This has increased awareness of the importance of local food production, including aquaculture and mariculture. In this study, we point out and calculate the economic values of environmental sustainability and food security inherent in local production versus import alternatives. We present a case study involving the environmental effects and food security of supplying sea fish to the Israeli market from local production versus imports. The results show that increasing the consumption of seabream in Israel from imports, rather than local production, causes substantial external costs by increasing environmental damage due to increased transport and increasing potential food insecurity. Decision-makers should take these costs into account when deciding on a policy to support local aquaculture.

In recent decades, there has been a noticeable increase in land conservation by the non-governmental sector, supplementing governmental efforts to preserve open spaces and landscapes at the urban–rural fringe. This trend should, according to a prominent urban economics model, have significant effects on urban real estate markets. The effects will vary along the income and home ownership distribution. The model is followed by an empirical investigation of the theoretical predictions using a rich data-set from the counties in the San Francisco Bay Area. The hedonic regressions show that private land conservation has a significant effect on housing prices, but this effect varies between areas with different housing tenure shares. An increase in the share of home renters in a neighbourhood diminishes the effect of land conservation on housing prices, confirming the predictions of the model. The results provide evidence in favour of spatially explicit policies to support conservation efforts.

Contrary to many studies regarding the efficient use of resources that measure the marginal cost of nature conservation by looking at a specific objective and asks about efficient way to achieve it, this article tries to estimate the (marginal) cost of nature conservation in a more flexible way. Instead of looking at a specific objective and then not being able to compare different objectives, we take an approach that is based on experts’ valuation of increased satisfaction from nature conservation. We trace the marginal cost of conservation from their answers and use official cost statistics. Officials in the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority (NPA) were surveyed to determine the activities required to increase the level of nature conservation in two districts of the NPA as well as nationwide. We determined the costs of these proposed activities, and subsequently were able to calculate the total cost and marginal cost of conservation efforts. When operating on a limited budget, conservation authorities can use these schedules as an additional tool to help determine the efficiency of different proposed activities both on a regional scale and nationwide, and to ensure the sustainability of the resulting conservation. In addition, our results demonstrate the existence of economies of scale in nature conservation, and the benefit of both bottom-up and top-down decision processes in nature conservation.