Understanding farmers' participation in and compliance with public and private standards

摘要

The agricultural direct support schemes of the European Union require that farmers comply with Cross-Compliance regulation. Further standards apply if farms become members of private certification schemes. Incentives to participate in these schemes are potentially manifold: financial rewards, standard overlap between the schemes, favorable farm structure allowing easy compliance, but also moderate expected costs in case of noncompliance. The paper develops a theoretical model explaining farmers' participation and joint compliance behavior and empirically evaluates the model using data from a survey of Austrian livestock farms. Evidence indicates that farmers weigh the importance of compliance, control, detection, and sanctions differently for the direct support and farm certification schemes but strive to comply with all rules. Hence, the theoretically expected trade-off between costs and benefits of participation occurs only to a low extent.