Mihaly Himics

Climate Impacts in Europe. The JRC PESETA II Project

The objective of the JRC PESETA II project is to gain insights into the sectoral and regional patterns of climate change impacts in Europe by the end of this century. The study uses a large set of climate model runs and impact categories (ten impacts: agriculture, energy, river floods, droughts, forest fires, transport infrastructure, coasts, tourism, habitat suitability of forest tree species and human health). The project integrates biophysical direct climate impacts into a macroeconomic economic model, which enables the comparison of the different impacts based on common metrics (household welfare and economic activity). Under the reference simulation the annual total damages would be around €190 billion/year, almost 2% of EU GDP. The geographical distribution of the climate damages is very asymmetric with a clear bias towards the southern European regions. More than half of the overall annual EU damages are estimated to be due to the additional premature mortality (€120 billion). Moving to a 2°C world would reduce annual climate damages by €60 billion, to €120 billion (1.2% of GDP).

EU-wide Economic and Environmental Impacts of CAP Greening with High Spatial and Farm-type Detail

This paper analyses the economic and environmental impacts of CAP greening. The simulated results reveal that the economic and environmental impacts of CAP greening are rather small. The CAP greening leads to a small increase in prices and a small decrease in production. Farm income slightly increases because the price effects offset the production decline. The environmental effects are positive on a per hectare basis, but the increase in UAA can reverse the sign for total impacts. GHG and ammonia emissions decrease in the EU, while the total N surplus, soil erosion and biodiversity-friendly farming practices slightly increase.

Potential EU-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement: Impact Assessment, Volume 1: Main results

This report presents the simulations made with two different models of two alternative hypothetical versions of a bilateral free trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur. The two versions of the agreement are based on the final negotiating positions of each party in the previous unresolved negotiating round. A global CGE model, GLOBE, simulates the economy-wide impacts of the trade policy changes involving all sectors of the two regional blocks. A global partial equilibrium model, CAPRI, simulates only the impacts generated by changes in agricultural trade policy and incurred by the agricultural sectors of the two regions. However, CAPRI considers individual agricultural products in more detail and can generate the territorial distribution of their production within the EU at the NUTS 2 regional level. The simulation results show that the economic losses and the adjustment pressures arising from a bilateral trade agreement between the EU and the countries of Mercosur would, as far as the EU is concerned, fall very heavily on the agricultural sector. The gains to other sectors would be widely diffused and, given the very small magnitude of these gains relative to the EU economy as a whole, would be easily absorbed without imposing an adjustment burden. The aggregate welfare changes for the EU, whether measured across the whole economy or on a partial basis with respect only to the activities agricultural production and food consumption, would be small. However, the trade-off involved in the redistribution of income between agriculture and the rest of the economy is steeper in the scenarios depicting the terms requested by Mercosur than in those involving the terms offered by the EU. The Mercosur request provokes a much greater downward impact on EU agriculture whereas the additional gains elsewhere (to non-agrifood sectors or to consumers in the EU) are relatively smaller.

Economic and environmental impacts of CAP greening: CAPRI simulation results

In this report we analyse the economic and environmental impacts of CAP greening introduced by the 2013 CAP reform. We use the CAPRI farm-type layer, an extension of CAPRI by farm group module capturing farm heterogeneity across the EU. Its main advantage in the context of our analysis is that it allows the current implementation of the CAP greening measures to be depicted in high detail, while also capturing the environmental effects and the market feedback of the simulated policy changes. The simulated results reveal that the economic impacts (land use, production, price and income changes) of CAP greening are rather small, although some farm types, sectors (fallow land and pulses) or Member States may be affected more significantly. Simulation results show that the CAP greening will lead to a simultaneous small increase in prices and a small decrease in production. The latter impact is due to the greening obligations that require farms to take out of production a small share of land and to the slight reduction in farm productivity driven by the land reallocation effects of greening measures. Farm income slightly increases because the price effects offset the production decline. The results indicate that EFA and grassland measures tend to induce slightly higher economic effects relative to the crop diversification measure, nevertheless some variation across crops and economic indicators is observed. Similarly to economic effects, the environmental impacts of CAP greening are small, although some regions may see greater effects than others. In general, effects at EU level are positive on a per hectare basis, but the increase in UAA can reverse the sign for total impacts. Overall, simulated GHG and ammonia emissions decrease in the EU, while the total N surplus, soil erosion and biodiversity-friendly farming practices indicator slightly increase due to the CAP greening. The crop diversification measure tends to have the lowest environmental impacts, while the grassland measure has mixed (both positive and negative) effects on the reported environmental indicators. The EFA measures have positive impacts on most environmental indicators, except for soil erosion.

Cumulative economic impact of future trade agreements on EU agriculture

This report presents potential effects of twelve free trade agreements (FTAs) under the current EU FTA agenda. It sheds some light on relatively balanced cumulated impacts in terms of trade, production and price for the EU agricultural sector as a whole, while quantifying also the market development for specific agricultural sectors. Different from a forecast exercise, it compares a conservative and an ambitious FTA scenario with a business as usual (reference) scenario.