The Agricultural Economics and Rural Policy Group succeeds in its mission "to perform advanced economic analyses on agriculture, food, rural areas and their policies". The research of the group is focused on three research themes: i) the economics of production, trade, processing and consumption of agricultural and food products; ii) agricultural, rural and food policies; and iii) institutional and organisational aspects of agriculture and rural areas.

The scientific quality of the group’s research is very good. The group’s research output regularly appears in the top field journals in agricultural economics and related disciplines; the group is highly visible and makes recognised contributions at the EU and international levels.

The group’s productivity is also very good, and in some respects excellent. In terms of the bibliometric criteria, the group’s output can be considered on or just below world average. However, the output of refereed journal articles is high and has increased in recent years. Future efforts could be directed at increasing the share of top journals within the group’s publications. An important criterion of productivity that is not reflected in the bibliometric analysis is the group’s excellent record of service to the agricultural economics profession. A highlight in this regard is the European Review of Agricultural Economics, in recent years regularly among the top impact-factor-ranked journals in this field, which has been edited by members of the group for roughly 20 years. Contributions of this nature are vital for the scientific community; if no one was willing to edit journals, no one could publish in them.

The relevance of the group’s work is very good. The group focuses on research topics that are important from a scientific and socio-economic perspective. In particular the third research focus (institutional aspects of agriculture and rural areas) is important in this regard. However, as the recent ‘food crisis’ has shown, ‘traditional’ agricultural economic analysis of food markets, trade and policy remains important. The group’s outreach efforts (publications for the general public and policy relevant work, for example on the impact of Turkish membership in the EU) deserve special recognition.

The vitality and feasibility of the group are good to very good, but we are concerned that recent retirements of key staff and the upcoming retirement of the Group Chair could lead to a temporary lack of coherent leadership and management capacity. We see potential for increased coordination and cooperation in some areas of research. These include work on rural development/regional issues (with ECH) and work on commodity chains/standards (with DEC). The foreseen clustering of groups into larger units could contribute to solutions in these areas.