This study outlines the current trends and patterns of farming employment in the EU and discusses possible development paths for the European agricultural labour force. In particular, this study investigates the drivers of and structural changes within agricultural labour markets at regional, national and EU level, building on a range of quantitative and qualitative analysis methods.

Differences in composition of seemingly identical branded food products (DC-SIP) occur when a good is marketed in one Member State as being identical (same brand labelling and same or similar front-of-pack appearance) to a good marketed in another Member State while that good has a significantly different composition or significantly different characteristics. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) developed a common testing methodology to examine the occurrence of this practice in the European single market. This methodology was applied in the first EU-wide testing campaign in 2018/2019. The objective of this study is to replicate the 2018/2019 testing campaign to provide figures for 2021 on the occurrence of DC-SIP in the European single market and to compare them with the results of the 2018/2019 testing campaign. In addition to the result of this comparison, this report presents the results of a survey of brand owners about their (potential) actions regarding DC-SIP in response to recent regulatory changes, namely the amended Directive 2005/29/EC - the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) - where a specific provision on DC-SIP (Article 6(2)(c)) was introduced by Directive (EU) 2019/2161.

More than half of total production costs for dairy producers is represented by feed, whose price level strongly depends on maize price patterns. However, the literature paid no attention to this vertical price transmission dynamics. This paper tries to fill the gap by investigating the interrelationship between Italian maize and feed prices, proposing a novel two-regime threshold-cointegration model where regimes are triggered by an observable transition variable. The latter accounts for both fundamental and non-fundamental drivers that recent literature found to be potential triggers influencing the transmission process. Empirical results suggest that the impact of non-fundamentals, especially financialization and energy price, is quite weak, whereas market fundamentals still play a significant role in shaping the price transmission dynamics. Furthermore, the cointegration relationship is found to be non-continuous, with several interruptions.