Agricultural land use in Europe has changed considerably in the last decades. However, our understanding of agricultural land use changes, especially changes in land use intensity, is limited because the evidence is fragmented. This paper presents a systematic review of case study evidence on manifestations and underlying drivers for agricultural land use change in Europe. We analyzed 137 studies that together report on 76 cases of intensification and 143 cases of disintensification. Observed changes were manifested as expansion or contraction of agricultural land as well as in changes of land management intensity, landscape elements, agricultural land use activity, and specialization/diversification. Economic, technological, institutional and location factors were frequently identified as underlying drivers, while demographic drivers and sociocultural drivers were mentioned less often. In addition, we found that farmers were very important as moderators between underlying drivers and manifestations of agricultural land use change. Farmer decisions differed between different farmer types, and according to their characteristics and attitudes. We found major land use change trajectories in relation to globalization of agricultural markets, the transition from a rural to an urban society, and the shift to post-socialism in central and eastern Europe

This article presents a meta-analysis of variations in price and income elasticities of residential water demand. Meta-analysis constitutes an adequate tool to synthesize research results by means of an analysis of the variation in empirical estimates reported in the literature. We link the variation in estimated elasticities to differences in theoretical microeconomic choice approaches, differences in spatial and temporal dynamics, as well as differences in research design of the underlying studies. The occurrence of increasing or decreasing block rate systems turns out to be important. With respect to price elasticities, the use of the discrete-continuous choice approach is relevant in explaining observed differences. (JEL H31, Q25)

This paper analyses the robustness of results on the relationship between growth and trust previously derived by Knack and Keefer (1997) and Zak and Knack (2001) along several dimensions, acknowledging the complexity of the concept of robustness. Our results show that the Knack and Keefer results are only limitedly robust, whereas the results found by Zak and Knack are highly robust in terms of significance of the estimated coefficients and reasonably robust in terms of the estimated effect size. The improvement in robustness is caused by the inclusion of countries with relatively low scores on trust (most notably, the Philippines and Peru). Overall, our results point at a relatively important role for trust. However, the answer to the question how large this payoff actually is depends on the set of conditioning variables controlled for in the regression analysis and—to an even larger extent—on the underlying sample.

The values of goods and services provided by wetland ecosystems are examined through a meta‐analysis of an expanded database of wetland value estimates and with a focus on human‐made wetlands. This study extends and improves upon previous meta‐analyses of the wetland valuation literature in terms of the number of observations, geographical coverage, wetland class and integrity, and the measurement of the effects of scarcity and anthropogenic pressure. We find that water quality improvement, nonconsumptive recreation, and provision of natural habitat and biodiversity are highly valued services. Substitution effects are observed through the negative correlation between values and abundance of other wetlands. Wetland values are found to increase with anthropogenic pressure. An extended metaregression model with cross effects shows that the valuation of specific services varies with the type of wetland producing them. Human‐made wetlands are highly valued for biodiversity enhancement, water quality improvement, and flood control.