Using indicators to assess the treatment effects of French agro-environmental measures

The ex-post evaluation of the agric-environmental Measures (AEM) of the Rural Development Programmes requires an assessment of their treatment effects. The first part of the article explains the general principles the net effects assessment procedure. The methodological framework mobilizes agric-environmental indicators as output variables within of two econometric approaches (matching and double difference). Regarding indicators choice, four criteria for selecting indicators are first proposed (the relevance of the indicator to represent an agricultural practice, the indicators status on the cause-effect chain, the spatial scale of calculation and the availability of variables in national databases) and then tested on 220 methods based on indicators and collected from an international survey. Finally, taking into account data availability and scale representativeness of the French agricultural statistical databases, we identify 40 relevant indicators to assess the treatment effects of the French water and biodiversity AEM.