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Tom Hertz 《Agricultural Economics》2009,40(2):161-176
This article documents a relationship between nonfarm income (primarily earnings and pensions) and agricultural investment in Bulgaria, specifically, expenditures on working capital (variable inputs such as feed, seed, and herbicides) and investment in livestock. Among those with positive spending on farm inputs, the estimated elasticity of these expenditures with respect to nonfarm income is 0.14. Nonfarm income also has an effect on the number of households that purchase farm animals, with an estimated elasticity of 0.35. The use of nonfarm income for farm investment is consistent with the presence of credit constraints, as is the fact that less than one percent of farmers report outstanding debts for agricultural purposes. Yet many farm households take out large unsecured loans for other purposes, primarily to cover consumption expenditures, implying that credit is available, but that farmers prefer not to use borrowed funds to finance agricultural investment. This would suggest that increases in the availability of agricultural credit may have little effect on farm outcomes, whereas increases in nondebt-financed sources of liquidity, such as subsidies or transfers, may better stimulate investment. 相似文献
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Factors explaining differences in economic efficiency between farms are of major interest to owners, managers, and other stakeholders as they strive to improve earnings and improve the chances of firm survival. This study is undertaken to improve our understanding of interfarm differences in, and opportunities to improve, farm household efficiency in utilizing their land, labor, and capital resources to achieve household objectives. The technical, allocative, and scale efficiencies of farm households are estimated using a nonparametric, output-based data envelopment analysis (DEA) of a panel data set from 1993 to 2006. Single and double bootstrapping procedures are used to estimate technical efficiency. Initial technical efficiency assuming variable returns to scale (TEV) is estimated to be 0.83. Using single bootstrapping, the average bias-corrected TEV estimate is 0.70; using double bootstrapping, the TEV estimate is 0.72. Allocative efficiency is estimated to be 0.81. Scale efficiency is estimated to be 0.93. The only factor that is consistently associated with higher technical efficiency across analysis methods and years is larger farm size (as measured by the log of farm income). The significance of other factors changes with analysis methods. 相似文献
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This article investigates the link between financing and investment in Ukrainian agriculture during economic transition. The main contribution of the study is to provide empirical evidence for the coexistence of financial constraints and soft budget constraints (SBCs). This is of particular importance because credit constraints and SBCs have completely different economic effects. The lack of differentiation between these forms of capital market imperfections yields overlapping effects of financing on investment and may therefore cause a misinterpretation of econometric results. Our empirical analyses are based on an econometric estimation of the Euler investment equations for 529 large farms from three Ukrainian regions between 2001 and 2005. The results confirm that financial variables significantly influence farms' investment, providing empirical evidence of an imperfect capital market in Ukrainian agriculture. It turns out that credit constraints in the Ukrainian agricultural sector are more important than SBCs. We show that the estimated level of financial constraints for profitable farms with access to loans is higher if both types of capital market imperfections are appropriately distinguished. 相似文献
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Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) is one of the regions in the world most affected by food price volatility and production variability. Poor small‐scale farmers in this region are particularly vulnerable to this variability. As a result, households may be reluctant to adopt new agricultural water management (AWM) technologies when they involve more risk than what they mitigate. Despite risk's role in AWM investments, there have been few attempts to estimate the magnitude and nature of risk aversion in relation to this type of farm decisions. To partially close this gap, this article uses an experimental approach applied to 137 households in Northern Ghana. We find that more than 70% of households are moderately or slightly risk averse. This contrasts with other studies in SSA, where most household decision‐makers exhibit severe to extreme risk aversion. We also find that households that stand to lose as well as gain something from participation in games are less risk averse than households playing gains‐only games. This result suggests that most farmers’ current wealth put them at risk of falling into a poverty trap. Thus, the losses from the riskiest investments on AWM technologies may fall more heavily on the poor, suggesting that additional efforts be given to the creation of viable insurance mechanisms. 相似文献
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This article demonstrates how economic and environmental improvement potentials of Danish pig farms can be estimated using Data envelopment analysis (DEA). To avoid some of the problems associated with the definition of undesirable outputs, environmental variables are included as nutrients applied with manure and nutrients removed with the crops. These environmental variables are combined with a series of economic variables, including the costs of fertilizer. Furthermore, subvector efficiency and a two‐step analysis are used in order to consider economic and environmental (technical) efficiency separately. The empirical results show considerable improvement potentials, especially on the environmental variables. Sensitivity studies validate that these results are robust to possible uncertainties in the measurement of the environmental variables. 相似文献
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This article demonstrates how technical efficiency and the impact of environmental regulations of Taiwanese farrow‐to‐finish swine production can be estimated in the presence of undesirable outputs. The issue of measuring technical efficiencies while considering undesirable outputs has been addressed by past studies. But the proper method of including undesirable outputs has always been a subject of debate. This article develops a data envelopment analysis (DEA)‐based model that includes undesirable outputs. The technologies of desirable output production and undesirable output control are considered simultaneously. This allows one to transform undesirable output into desirable output, whereby a traditional Shephard distance function can be used to measure technical efficiencies. An approach to measuring the impacts due to environmental regulations is then derived. Empirical results show that larger farms are more technically efficient than small‐sized farms, but no clear conclusions can be reached for the measures of regulatory impact among farms with different sizes. On average, the sample farms incurred an opportunity cost due to environmental regulations equivalent to 9.8% of market value. Opportunity costs rise with efficiency. 相似文献
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Both informal and formal loans matter in agriculture. However, formal lenders provide many more production loans than informal lenders, often at a cost (mostly loan default cost) higher than what they can recover. For example, the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan (ADBP), providing about 90% of formal loans in rural areas, incurs high loan default costs. Yet, like other governments, the Government of Pakistan supports the formal scheme on the grounds that lending to agriculture is a high risk activity because of covariate risk. Hence, such policies are often based on a market failure argument. As farm credit schemes are subsidised, policy makers must know if these schemes are worth supporting. Using a recent large household survey data from rural Pakistan (Rural Financial Market Studies or RFMS), we have attempted to estimate the effectiveness of the ADBP as a credit delivery institution. A two‐stage method that takes the endogeneity of borrowing into account is used to estimate credit impact. Results reveal that ADBP contributes to household welfare and that its impact is higher for smallholders than for large holders. Nevertheless, large holders receive the bulk of ADBP finance. The ADBP is, thus, not a cost‐effective institution in delivering rural finance. Its cost‐effectiveness can be improved by reducing its loan default cost and partially by targeting smallholders in agriculture where credit yields better results. 相似文献
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Based on a random sample of 240 farm households in Chiang Mai province, Thailand, this study shows that—contrary to widespread belief—Karen farm households are well-integrated into markets. Average levels of market integration are 31% for gross farm output, 35% for variable inputs, 49% for food consumption, and 80% for net family income. By estimating a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression model, this study finds that integration into output markets is positively associated with a diversification of land use away from rice monoculture, more intense contact with nearby urban centers, and a greater number of roads connecting the village to the outside world. Controlling for these factors, the distance to urban centers does not impede market integration; distant villages are equally well integrated into output markets. The study further finds that integration into output markets improves farm productivity and net per capita income. Concerns about market integration are discussed. Results have implications for Thai policy makers who have recently placed increasing emphasis on the concept of "sufficiency economy" in order to promote the well-being of rural people. 相似文献
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Sangtaek Seo Eduardo Segarra Paul D. Mitchell David J. Leatham 《Agricultural Economics》2008,38(1):47-55
Water shortage has been a significant issue for several decades in the Texas High Plains. Agriculture has been identified as the main activity contributing to this shortage. To address this issue, many efforts have been focused on the possible adoption of sophisticated irrigation systems with high levels of water application efficiency. In this study, the entry and exit thresholds for the low‐energy precision application (LEPA) system are analyzed simultaneously in cotton farming in the Texas High Plains using a real options approach. The results show that the LEPA system is profitable only when cotton price is set above $1.59/kg. The exit (entry) threshold is consistently low (high) over a range of values for parameter changes including investment cost, exit cost, variable cost, risk‐adjusted discount rate, and volatility rate, so it is unlikely that farmers with irrigation systems in place would leave them easily. This implies that to attain the goal of saving water, Lubbock County needs to focus on convincing current farmers to replace old irrigation systems with new ones. 相似文献
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The effect of marketing quotas and price supports on technology adoption are examined for peanut production in the southeastern United States using a real options model of investment with output price and yield uncertainty. The optimal choice of peanut production technology (dryland versus irrigated) in the southeast is shown to depend on price supports and how they change. The manner in which price supports change will have an effect on the choice and rates of abandonment or adoption of production technologies. 相似文献
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During the last three decades in sub‐Saharan Africa, development and research resources have concentrated on the higher‐rainfall and irrigated regions, especially on export crops and the principal food crops grown there. There has been much less concern and investment in semiarid regions without irrigation. Another negative factor has been the lack of public policy concern with the profitability of the basic food crops. With good weather, prices collapse. With bad weather, governments and NGOs dispense food crops as food aid or at subsidized prices. This article documents the importance of the demand side to facilitate diffusion of new technologies for the basic food commodities of semiarid regions—the traditional cereals. With farm programming models aggregated into a sector model, the combination of technological change and demand shifts for sorghum are evaluated in one semiarid region where the traditional cereals are concentrated. It focuses on combining policies to increase the prices farmers receive after introduction of technologies that use higher input levels. It also compares benefits of a strategy that focuses on yield and demand increases for a traditional cereal of the semiarid region, sorghum, with two alternative strategies for the higher‐rainfall zone. 相似文献
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Recently the managerial decision making process has been given new attention, both in theoretical studies as well as in empirical research explaining differences in farm results. However, while critical to explaining efficiency, managerial ability has been difficult to measure and therefore often ignored. This study attempts to measure managerial ability. It divides the decision making process into four steps: goal formulation, planning, monitoring and evaluation. The quality of each step is measured in a panel of 26 specialised flower producers, The impact of decision making on the firms' efficiencies is measured by means of a stochastic frontier production function. A one‐step procedure is used in which technical and decision making parameters are jointly estimated. The results show positive associations between firm efficiency and the quality of decision making (especially monitoring and firm evaluation), indicating that this procedure has been potentially successful and is a move towards successfully measuring a critical input. 相似文献
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Stages and determinants of fertilizer use in semiarid African agriculture: the Niger experience 总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2
Fertilization is a stepwise decision in Niger. Survey data from a representative sample of 100 households were utilized with individual and joint estimation to evaluate the determinants of fertilizer use at its three different stages: manure alone and two different types of inorganic fertilizer application. The fertilizer price relative to the millet price was always a highly significant determinant of fertilizer adoption. Farmers' experience in seeing the results of fertilization in the field was a principal factor influencing the use of manure and of the micro‐fertilization. Other studies in semiarid regions have emphasized risk, liquidity, or fertilizer responsiveness under harsh conditions but the shift to the micro doses of inorganic fertilizer was statistically associated here with the demonstration trials and the price ratios (fertilizer/millet). A variable reflecting the millet price recovery approximately 6 months after harvest was the most important factor in the decision to raise further inorganic fertilizer use with side dressing. Policy implications were focused on the importance of demonstration trials and improvements in the economic conditions (millet–fertilizer price ratios). 相似文献
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The relationship between technical efficiency and size might be affected by farm heterogeneity. We analyse this relationship conditional on a set of control variables. These control variables are chosen using a production model where technical efficiency is introduced as a parameter. As a result, technical efficiency affects both the input demand and the output supply of a profit maximising producer. The empirical application explores these issues using panel data of dairy farms in Spain. 相似文献
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Abdourahmane Thiam Boris E. Bravo-Ureta Teodoro E. Rivas 《Agricultural Economics》2001,25(2-3):235-243
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Sub‐Saharan Africa is the only developing region of the world where agricultural output has been trailing population growth for most of the last three decades. Farming systems in the region are inherently risky because they are fundamentally dependent on the vagaries of weather. In addition, it is a region of crises; poverty, civil strife, and HIV/AIDS. Attention must therefore be focused on improving the production of crops that could thrive under these circumstances. Because of its tolerance of extreme drought and low input use conditions, cassava is perhaps the best candidate in this regard. And cassava is a basic food staple and a major source of farm income for the people of the region. The use of hired labor is important for its production growth because cassava root yield responds positively to the application of hired labor. This article, based on farm‐level information collected from six major cassava‐producing countries of Africa, within the framework of the Collaborative Study of Cassava in Africa, identifies strategic variables affecting the hired labor use decisions of producing households. The characteristics of the household head (age and number of years of formal education), the size of the household farm, good market access, and population pressure are found to motivate households to apply hired labor in cassava production. These observations underscore the need for investing in people—education—and in infrastructure—market access—as possible tools for improving food production in the region. The positive effect of farm size also suggests that some kind of land reform, which would put more farmland at the disposal of farm households, could be favorable to improving cassava production. 相似文献
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C. C. de Lauwere 《Agricultural Economics》2005,33(2):229-238
It is thought that agricultural entrepreneurs have an important role to play in Dutch agriculture. They are currently being confronted with drastic changes and it is open to question whether or not they are willing and able to deal with such changes. A telephone survey was carried out in order to find an answer to this question. The data presented here are based on the answers from 752 farmers. The questions to be answered were: (1) Which strategies do agricultural entrepreneurs choose to keep up with business demands? (2) Which personal characteristics are related to these choices and to successful agricultural entrepreneurship in general? (3) Do agricultural entrepreneurs in the Netherlands meet the demands of “real” entrepreneurship according to economic theories? Agricultural entrepreneurship was conceptualized into the strategic orientations, social orientation, growth orientation, and financial conservatism. The data showed that five different types of farmers could be distinguished on the basis of their preferences for different strategic orientations. Social farmers had especially high scores for social orientation, traditional growers for growth orientation, prudent farmers for financial conservatism, new growers for both social orientation and growth orientation, and indecisive farmers for all strategic orientations. The latter group was eliminated from the data because farmers in this group had the highest scores for almost all items of the questionnaire, whether or not these concerned positive or negative aspects of entrepreneurship. Moreover, they gave contradictory answers to comparable questions. Based on future expectations and family income, it was concluded that social farmers and new growers were more successful than other farmers. According to economic theories, they also seemed to meet the “demands” of “real” entrepreneurship better than other farmers because they can be called “movers of the market,”“innovators,” and/or “discoverers of profit opportunities.” New growers and social farmers were also distinguishable from the other groups of farmers by their personal characteristics. In general, it could be concluded that positive personal characteristics (self‐criticism, leadership, creativity, perseverance, and initiative) affected agricultural entrepreneurship positively, and negative personal characteristics (love of ease and passivity) affected it negatively. 相似文献
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