Income effects of EU biofuel policies in Germany

The persistency of EU policies supporting first generation biofuels despite the clearly emerging picture of ecological benefits of this policy being small or even negative, leads to the conclusion that this policy is driven by other objectives such as its distributional effects. Against this background, the main objective of this article is to analyse income effects of an abolishment of biofuel policies at a disaggregated level for the German agricultural sector. Effects are estimated for different farm types and regions. Furthermore, differences between farm net value added and family farm income are analysed and distributional effects are estimated.