Agricultural Economics, 2013 (vol. 59), issue 7
Consumers' perception of the health aspects of organic foodOriginal Paper
Olga KUTNOHORSKÁ, Pavel TOMŠÍK
Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2013, 59(7):293-299 | DOI: 10.17221/142/2012-AGRICECON 
Organic foods are grown using the principles of organic agriculture that are produced, processed and packaged without using chemicals. They have been accepted due to their several perceived benefits over the conventional food. Health aspects of organic food are, in addition to the ethical, environmental, hedonic and "feel good" aspects, the main benefits that the consumers appreciate in organic food. This paper presents the results of a quantitative survey in the Czech organic food market. By using the factor analysis, it showed that the consumer perception of the health benefits of organic food can be viewed from several different angles. There were...
Performance of Swiss dairy farms under provision of public goodsOriginal Paper
Phatima MAMARDASHVILI, Dierk SCHMID
Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2013, 59(7):300-314 | DOI: 10.17221/148/2012-AGRICECON
Farmers provide not only agricultural products but also public goods and services. When analyzing farm performance, these different outputs should be modelled separately. In this study, we investigated Swiss dairy farms located in the plain, hill and mountainous regions for the period between 2003 and 2009. For the representation of production technology, we employed a parametric output distance function and modeled particular public goods and services as a separate output. The resulted elasticities of agricultural output coincided with the corresponding shares of this output. However, the elasticities of particular public goods and services were higher...
A spatial econometric study on effects of fiscal and financial supports for agriculture in ChinaOriginal Paper
Gao YUANDONG, Wen TAO, Yi WEN, Wang XIAOHUA
Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2013, 59(7):315-332 | DOI: 10.17221/126/2012-AGRICECON
Since the reform and opening-up, the disparity between Chinese rural economy and the overall national economic development has already become the key constraint for further development of the national economy. In order to increase the farmers' income and to promote rural economic development, the efforts of China's budgetary and financial policies to support agriculture have been strengthened year by year. However, it lacks an accurate and effective assessment to evaluate the effects of China's fiscal and financial policies supports for agriculture. This paper proposes to estimate and measure the effects of China's fiscal and financial supports for...
Volatility and stabilization of the price of coffee and cocoa in Côte d'IvoireOriginal Paper
Benoit Beila MALAN
Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2013, 59(7):333-340 | DOI: 10.17221/145/2012-AGRICECON
The aim of this paper was to study the coffee and cocoa price volatility in Côte d'Ivoire and to understand the mechanism of price stabilization. Thus, this paper shows that the international prices and the farm gate prices of these two products are strongly dispersed around their respective average, from one year to another and within each year. This paper proposes a model of partial stabilization which makes it possible to highlight an alternate mechanism of the coffee and cocoa price stabilization which is relatively efficient compared to the mechanism which currently exists. It shows that a marketing board in the Ivorian coffee and cocoa sector,...