Final Report Summary - MAPSTART (Modelling agricultural policies: State of the art and new challenge) The main objective of the MAPSTART project was to review and discuss the different tools and methods that were recently developed to assess the impact of agricultural policies. This target was achieved through the organisation of a specific scientific seminar, titled 'Modelling agricultural policies: State of the art and new challenges', which was held in Parma from 3 to 5 February 2005. More specifically, the project objectives were to: 1. provide information on the state of the art of the methodologies used by agricultural economic researchers in order to build models able to evaluate the impact of policy measures 2. investigate the ex and post approaches that were designed and applied to analyse the efficiency and effectiveness of tools contained, in particular, in the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms 3. demonstrate innovative developments in the evaluation of the consequences of agricultural policies, focussing on the CAP reforms, at production and economic levels by using sector and farm models 4. analyse the methodologies and models that offered the possibility to assess the impact of agricultural policy measures at the environmental level 5. serve as an opportunity to point stakeholders' attention on the tools that were used to evaluate the impact of policy measures on rural development and, in a more specific manner, on the multifunctional activity of farms, in order to assess the changes in the level of externalities and in the value of public goods that were produced by agricultural productive processes. The organisation of the scientific initiative concerned the qualitative and quantitative techniques that were mainly used in the European research context, in order to evaluate the responses of agriculture towards sectoral policy scenarios. MAPSTART was organised in eight distinct, yet interrelated work packages that focussed on crucial activities for the seminar success. These included the creation and implementation of a project website, the call for papers along with their evaluation and review and the determination of the applied scientific programme. The dissemination of the seminar results, along with the organisation of a meeting for the project closure, were also among the undertaken activities. Related documents Final Report - MAPSTART (Modelling agricultural policies: State of the art and new challenge)
