Innovation in Labour Organisation and Social Conditionality: Implications for Farm Advisory Services

There is growing concern about the evolution of working conditions for employees on European farms. In the new Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), financial support to farmers will soon be subject to a social conditionality clause. As a result of this change in CAP regulations, in this paper we ask if the need for specific advice can already be foreseen? Examining recent investigations that focused on new forms of labour organisations on farms can help to answer this question. Investigations were conducted across France, combining qualitative field studies with a comprehensive analysis of statistical and administrative data. The results show a growing complexity of farm labour organisation that generates needs for new types of advice. In particular, an increasing proportion of the people working on farms are employed by another organisation (foreign and domestic service providers, employers’ alliances, etc.). The administrative data provides strong evidence of the scale of this trend which has little visibility in the agricultural census data. We should therefore be cautious about oversimplified representations of labour patterns at farm level. They can distort policy design, implementation and assessment by overlooking a part of the worker population and needs for new types of advice, including those that will be required to meet social conditionality requirements.     

Doubling Back on Double Marginalization

Review of Industrial Organization - “Double marginalization” and “Elimination of Double marginalization” are catch-phrases commonly used in the IO literature. In this...     

Working time reduction and employment in a finite world*

We study the consequences of a working time reduction (WTR) in a growth model with efficiency wages and an essential natural resource (natural capital), and in which technical progress cannot reduce the resource content of final production to zero. We show that if natural capital is scarce enough, a WTR increases the long-term levels of the hourly wage and employment. A numerical analysis of the transitory impacts of a WTR confirms that when natural capital is scarcer, a WTR increases employment more and the hourly wage less, with a less negative initial impact on output.     

What Makes Firms Dissatisfied with Their Bank Loans: New Evidence from Survey Data

Journal of Financial Services Research - We use loan-by-loan association between non-financial firms and their banks to disentangle the effects of financial weakness of borrowers and lenders on the...