Iryna Kychko

Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
Sustainable agrifood transformation requires clearer evidence on whether stricter environmental policy frameworks are associated with measurable changes in organic agricultural land use. This study examines whether environmental policy stringency is associated with the development of organic agriculture across OECD member countries, accession candidates, and key partner economies during 2004–2023. The analysis uses three unbalanced panel datasets covering total organic agricultural land, organic cropland, and organic permanent meadows and pastures, with 951 observations for 49 countries, 461 observations for 35 countries, and 457 observations for 35 countries, respectively; the methodology applies a set of panel-data specifications with robustness checks based on alternative specifications and individual policy-component models. The results show that international policy stringency has the strongest association with total organic agricultural land. In the preferred two-way fixed-effects model, a one-point increase in lagged international policy stringency is associated with a 0.721 percentage-point increase in the organic agricultural land share. In comparison, cross-sectoral policy stringency is associated with a 0.155 percentage-point increase. For organic cropland, both policy dimensions are positive and statistically significant, with coefficients of 0.216 and 0.354, respectively. For organic permanent meadows and pastures, policy coefficients indicate weaker responsiveness to broad environmental policy frameworks. Supplementary checks provide more cautious evidence: the first-difference result for international policy stringency is positive but only weakly significant, while the quadratic specification indicates a U-shaped pattern with an estimated turning point near 2.00 on the 0–10 scale. The findings should be interpreted as conditional associations rather than causal effects.