Contract farmer and poultry farm efficiency in Bangladesh: a data envelopment analysis

The objective of this article is to determine the efficiency of the poultry farm in Bangladesh and to assess the influence of contract farming system, using a data envelopment analysis. Seventy-five commercial poultry farms (25 and 50 independent and contract farms, respectively) were randomly selected. The results reveal that efficiency scores vary across sample farms. To explain some of these variations, the efficiency scores were regressed on some human capital variables and farming system using a Tobit model. The study also estimates elasticities to provide the information on the magnitude of the influence of variables on Technical Efficiency (TE), Allocative Efficiency (AE) and Economic Efficiency (EE). The results show that the contracting system is positively and significantly related to the farm's TE, AE and EE. This is expected because under contractual agreement, in order to obtain sufficient supplies of the right quality of poultry meat at the right time, the company provides technical know how assistance through company's recruited supervisor, production inputs and services, and production credit along with intensive supervision, which in turn improves farm efficiency. Thus, by receiving technical know how contract farmers have gained more knowledge on their resource and practices, which enables them to use resources more efficiently. Empirical results can provide crucial information to policy makers that improve poultry farm efficiency.     

Industrial conglomerates,risk spreading and the transition in Russia

This article explains the lasting transition crisis of Russian agriculture by applying Hayami & Ruttan's theory of induced innovation. The empirical analysis uses Russian farm data. For various types of farms factor intensities and partial factor productivities are calculated to identify differences in productivity between them. We identify the mechanism through which institutional frictions in Russia influence the choice of technology and the adaptation of technological change. Finally, policy recommendations are derived to make technical change more consistent with relative factor supplies and prices, and improve productivity, especially of inefficient farm types. In our view nothing speaks in favour of expensive Western ‘high-tech’ machinery imports to enhance the efficiency of Russian farms (especially larger ones). Until now the poor operation of domestic markets in Russia has obstructed a sufficient supply of Russian technology consistent with relative scarcities.     

Performance of the Norwegian dairy farms: A dynamic stochastic approach

From a theoretical perspective, it is well stated that the farm's decision on the use of inputs depends on the farmer's ability to make an efficient decision over time. The existing literature in performance analysis of the dairy farms based on static modeling and thus ignores the inter-temporal nature of production decisions. This paper aims to construct a dynamic stochastic production frontier incorporating the sluggish adjustment of inputs, to measure the performance of dairy farms in Norway. The empirical application focused on the farm-level analysis of the Norwegian dairy sector for 2000- 2018. The dynamic frontier estimated using the system Generalized Method of Moments estimator. The analysis shows that the static model in the previous studies underestimates the performance of the dairy farms.     

A note on the elasticity of demand for wagering

Data envelopment analysis is used to establish comparisions of maximum profit without and with participation in government progarammes. A measure of a farm's ability to survive, returns on equity, is used to measure the benefit received from participation in government programmes. Density functions are estimated with kernel density estimation using bootstrap samples, and weighted regressions are used to test density estimation using bootstrap samples, and weighted regressions are used to test the equality of mean benefits between different size groups. The results indicate that almost all farms that could be considered of commercial size receive the same benefit from participation in government programmes.     

Grain and sunflower on Russian farms in 2001: how efficient is crop production?

An unusually detailed sample of large farms in Rostov, Ivanovo and Nizhny Novgorod regions of Russia in 2001 allows microeconomic examination of the production of grain and sunflower crops on Russian farms. Farms are found to have some excess capital and labour, but not land and other types of capital. New operators are found to be more efficient than other farms thought they do not necessarily produce more output. Neither rural infrastructure, location nor specialisation has a clear impact on farm efficiency. How workers are paid is found to be a potential short‐term method for improving farm efficiency that would not involve major farm restructuring.     

State-led or market-led green revolution? Role of private irrigation investment vis-a-vis local government programs in West Bengal's farm productivity growth

We estimate the role of private investments in irrigation in farm productivity growth in West Bengal, India between 1982 and 95. Using a state-wide farm panel, we find that falling groundwater costs generated significant growth in value added per acre for farms. These resulted from investments in minor irrigation which was stimulated by tenancy registration programs implemented by local governments. This helps account for substantial spillover effects of the tenancy reform on non-tenant farms noted in an earlier study. Hence the West Bengal Green Revolution of the 1980s benefited from complementarity between private investment incentives and state-led institutional reforms.     

Did the Thai rice-pledging programme improve the economic performance and viability of rice farming?

This article evaluates impacts of the rice-pledging programme on the economic performance and viability of rice farming in Thailand. It also investigates whether the effects of the programme are heterogeneous across different farm types using the propensity score matching technique to address the self-selection bias in the farm-level data set. We found that the programme enhanced the economic performance less than hoped for. Overall, the programme was estimated to improve the net direct farm income for participating farms by $175.12–$194.82 per hectare. Taking into account the heterogeneous effects of the programme across farm types, we calculated that the greatest effects may be realized by farmers within the small farms subsample, at $404.41–$439.85 per hectare, but only $139.80–$213.36 per hectare for midsize farms, and $138.82–$173.34 per hectare for large farms. With regard to the economic viability of the programme, we discovered that it had an insignificant effect on farm modernization investment initiatives. Thus, future strategies incorporated into the programme that better control increases in production costs, improve small farmers’ access to the programme and require participating farms to spend a portion of the money received on farm modernization may improve long-run benefits of the programme.     

Farm Survival and Growth in Transition Economies: Theory and Empirical Evidence from Hungary

Our conceptual model states that new individual farms may begin at a small, even sub-optimal, scale of production and then those farms that are successful will survive and grow, whereas those that are not will remain small and may ultimately be forced to exit from production. The samples of individual farms analysed throughout this article are drawn from the 1998 Farm Survey in Hungary. Our estimation results show that older and larger farms are more likely to survive, farm growth decreases with farm age when farm size is held constant and that learning considerations are important. Beside these standard results, in transition economies farmers', market and industry characteristics have a significant impact on the survival and growth rates of individual farm enterprises.     

Tenure Security and Long‐term Investment on Tenanted Land: Evidence from Colonial Taiwan

We use farm diary data from Taiwan in the 1920s and 1930s to estimate the impacts of a state‐wide tenancy reform on tenants’ investment in the farmland and production outcome. The reform, commencing in 1922, enhanced the tenure security for the tenants by promoting written contracts that extended tenure length from 1 year to 5–6 years, and by establishing government‐sponsored organizations for dispute settlements. Our estimations rely on a difference‐in‐difference framework, where self‐cultivated farms are used as the control group. We find that the reform encouraged tenants to make investments in the irrigation and drainage system of the farms, which is expected to have long‐lasting benefits for production. The improved irrigation/drainage system led to significant efficiency gains for the farms. In contrast, the reform did not affect tenants’ usage of fertilizer much, which benefits production for only a crop season or a year.     

Strategic management implications for the adoption of technological innovations in agricultural tractor: the role of scale factors and environmental attitude

Technological innovations in agricultural tractors have revolutionised farming, increased labour productivity and reduced operator's hazards. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relation between agricultural tractors’ technological innovations and farm size, as well as users’ attitude on environmental impact of agricultural tractors according to their age and years of activity in the farm. Results, concerning Italy, highlight that high technological innovations of tractors are associated to larger farms, which are managed professionally by more efficient and sophisticated agricultural machineries. Empirical evidence also shows that the older the tractor adopters are and the longer they have been working in agriculture, the higher is their commitment to environment protection and safe working conditions. These results could be important for critical strategic management implications to spur technological innovation in agricultural tractors that better satisfy farmer's needs and to support the fruitful adoption of innovations for an efficient and safe modern agriculture.     

An Analysis of the Performance of Commercially Oriented Farms in Hungary

As a result of the economic restructuring and political reforms undertaken during the 1990s, Hungary has a varied set of farm types that encompass a wide array of different sizes, degrees of capital intensity and forms of ownership. This article explores the performance of Hungarian farms and concludes that, in contrast to other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, the majority of commercially oriented farms are profitable. However, estimates are sensitive to the valuation of own land and labour inputs. From the application of factor and cluster analysis, eight clusters of farms are profiled and the most competitive group identified. While the most profitable cluster also has the highest mean farm size, farm consolidation should not be treated as a panacea for dealing with low agricultural returns in the region.     

规模化养殖对我国肉鸡生产效率的影响——基于随机前沿生产函数的实证分析

采用随机前沿方法,利用2004—2010年我国24个省份的肉鸡生产数据,实证分析了规模化养殖对我国肉鸡生产效率的影响,并对不同养殖规模的肉鸡生产效率进行了测度和比较。结果显示:规模化养殖很大程度上提高了我国肉鸡生产效率,中规模养殖使肉鸡生产效率提高了16.89%,大规模养殖使肉鸡生产效率提高了57.62%;我国肉鸡生产效率的地区差异较大,且南方地区不同养殖规模的肉鸡生产效率存在显著差异,而北方地区的这种差异较小;标准化规模养殖程度不高是南方地区的肉鸡生产效率总体偏低且不同养殖规模的肉鸡生产效率存在较大差异的主要原因。     

TECHNOLOGY,POLICY DISTORTIONS,AND THE RISE OF LARGE FARMS

Between 1900 and 2002, mean farm size in the United States tripled; productive resources were increasingly concentrated in large farms. These observations are difficult to explain as results of profit maximization by farmers in a frictionless equilibrium model, given exogenous factor endowment and technology. I show that notable shifts in the farm size distribution coincided with important changes in farm legislation and that farm programs provided larger farms more subsidy per dollar of output produced. These farm‐level distortions are crucial for the increasing dominance of large farms but have little impact on employment and productivity in agriculture.     

RUSSIAN LIVING STANDARDS DURING THE INDUSTRIALIZATION ERA, 1885–1913*

In this paper, I have examined the relative growth rates of personal consumption, government consumption, and national income in Russia from 1885–1913 and have contrasted them with the “European” model (derived from the U.K. and German experience). Two hypotheses of the conventional model of Russian industrialization were tested: the retarded growth of personal consumption and the accelerated growth of government consumption and investment (relative to the European model) and the growing Europeanization of Russian growth after 1906. The estimates of personal consumption and government consumption failed to sustain either hypothesis. In fact, the reverse hypotheses appear to be more plausible. The lack of data on investment prevented the testing of the investment hypothesis, but the limited evidence which is available does not point to an extraordinary growth of investment. As a final experiment, the combined growth rates of personal and government consumption were compared with a revision of Goldsmith's national income estimates. They were shown to provide strong support for the accuracy of the revision of Goldsmith's estimates.     

Economic efficiency adjusted for risk preferences

This study investigates the impact of risk preferences on cost and revenue efficiency for a sample of farms. Risk preference scores were used to measure risk aversion. Cost and revenue efficiency were estimated using traditional input and output measures, and then re-estimated including each farm’s risk preference score. Comparisons were made between farms with and without a change in efficiency when each farm’s risk preference was included in the analysis. As expected, risk preference plays an important role in explaining farm inefficiency. Failure to account for risk preferences overstates inefficiency, particularly for slightly risk averse and risk neutral farms.     

Costs and benefits of on-farm nature conservation

The costs of on-farm nature conservation is an important issue in Dutch agriculture. As nature is a public good, nature conservation cannot do without subsidies from the government. The question of how much farmers should receive in subsidies in order to keep farms engaged in conservation activities is highly topical. In this article, the questions of how much farmers should receive in subsidies and what other factors motivate or demotivate farmers to participate in on-farm nature conservation are addressed. The study was carried out for a particular region in the northern Netherlands and was initiated by the concerns that farmers organisations had about the level of subsidies for landscape conservation as a major form of nature conservation on dairy farms in this region.In this study, both a normative model and a survey were employed. A normative economic dairy farm model was first used to determine differences in income between a typical farm involved in landscape conservation and a typical farm not involved in landscape conservation. Results from the model show that the farm involved in conservation earned a lower income than the farm not involved in conservation. This was due to the first farmer's smaller scale, lower intensity and lower productivity. The lower income, however, was compensated for by conservation subsidies. Next, a survey concerning on-farm nature conservation in general was carried out among the farmers in this area. From the survey results, it appeared that the majority of the respondents were satisfied, at least to some extent, with the level of subsidies for on-farm nature conservation. Moreover, the survey also revealed that the farmers' commitment to their natural environment strongly motivates farmers to get involved in on-farm nature conservation schemes, whereas the uncertainty about regulations and the feeling of being controlled too much demotivate them.The results show the complementarity of the two methods. The findings of the survey confirm the main findings of the normative model calculations, and, moreover, the survey reveals that in addition to monetary compensation, other factors play a role for farmers in the decision to get involved in on-farm nature conservation.     

Russian oil: the role of the sector in Russia's economy

Russia's oil sector is critical to the country's overall economic development at present and may affect the whole Russian economy in the next several years. Nevertheless, like all other energy sectors in the Russian Federation, it faces a number of problems, including low domestic prices, a poor regulatory framework, little competition, underinvestment and environmental failure. There is little know‐ledge of the real needs and problems of the sector, including high production costs, weak transport infrastructure, low investment and obsolete technical equipment, but instead there is permanent political pressure to increase the tax burden. In this context the analysis presented in the article contributes to ongoing discussions and presents a number of numerical estimations relating to the current situation of the oil sector in Russia, including overall sector revenue, cost estimates, total tax burden, present level of investment etc., and simulations of the situation in the sector under different future oil price scenarios.     

Innovation and productivity in agricultural firms: evidence from a country-wide farm-level innovation survey

ABSTRACT

The literature on the links between innovation and productivity at the firm level in agriculture is almost nonexistent. In this paper, we analyze the factors behind the innovation effort of farms and the impact that innovation effort has on farm’s productivity, exploiting a unique farm-level agricultural innovation survey carried out in Uruguay. The results indicate that farm size, cooperation with other agents to perform R&D, the education of the owner of the farm, the participation of foreign capital and the existence of links with other organizations, in particular scientific, horizontal and vertical ones, are positively correlated with innovation effort. Public and private financial support are not clearly linked with innovation effort. The innovation effort has a positive effect on farm’s productivity. Some heterogeneities across industries in agriculture are found.     

Birds of a feather: Evidence on commonality of corruption and democracy in the origin and location of foreign investment in Russian regions

We examine the effects of subnational variations in corruption and democratization on the location decisions of foreign investors in Russian regions using firm-level panel data for the period 1996–2007. We link these effects to the level of corruption and type of political regime in the country of origin of a foreign investor. We find a relationship between attributes of foreign investors' home countries and attributes of the regions in which investment takes place: foreign investors from less corrupt and democratic countries tend to invest in less corrupt and more democratic Russian regions, whereas those from more corrupt and non-democratic countries tend to invest in more corrupt and less democratic regions. An inference is that, in Russian regions with high corruption and with autocratic government, foreign direct investment appears driven by the personal interests of controlling regional political elites who collaborate for mutual gain with foreign investors from corrupt and autocratic countries. Our results suggest a general conclusion that origin and location of foreign investment are linked by common political culture.     

Organic farms' seasonal farm labour-sourcing strategies in the pre-‘Arizona’ mode of immigration control

This study analysed the strategies of the more labour-intensive organic farms in sourcing seasonal farmworkers for their operations. The study period (2002) captures the farm labour market conditions prior to enforcement of stricter ‘Arizona’ style of immigration controls. Farmers at that time usually would tend to exhaust the full potentials of family labour contributions before relying on off-farm labour sources. When off-farm workers were considered, the results establish the farms' dependence on foreign labourers for seasonal farm work, although farmers seemed to have already been more cautiously hiring these workers in areas with lower concentrations of undocumented workers. This study also confirmed that farmers generally used high wage offers (possibly directed to domestic workers with more employment options) to lure them into working in their farms. The results also emphasize the need for improvements in the H2A guest farmworker visa programme that did not offer significant remedy for seasonal farm labour hiring at that time.