The impact of green economy measures on rural employment: Green jobs in farms

In the circular economy concept, besides protecting the environment, green policy measures provide essential economic benefits through resource security, economic stability, and the creation of green jobs. This study centres its attention on the labour use aspect of the circular economy and aims to examine the potential for green economy measures to create green jobs in the agriculture sector. As a methodological approach, we combine top-down and bottom-up analyses of the green economy experience of Slovenia, where agri-environmental measures (AEM) play an essential role in the Slovenian rural development programme (2007-2014), with the highest amount of subsidies per unit of output among the 10 new European Union Member States. The results show that an AEM adoption of green policy measures by very large dairy and field crop farms significantly increases total labour use: while for field crop farms this increase is in hired labour, for dairy farms this increase is in family labour. While hired and family labour perform as substitutes for very large dairy farms, they perform as complements for very large field crop farms. The present study suggests further steps towards identifying the green economy measures that are needed to create green jobs in the agriculture sector for rural youth. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.