Agricultural Economics, 2015 (vol. 61), issue 11

Agriculture in the EU and position of the Slovak RepublicOriginal Paper

Ľuboslav SZABO, Miroslav GRZNÁR

Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(11):493-501 | DOI: 10.17221/70/2015-AGRICECON  

The paper analyses disparity in the performance of farms in the EU countries and identifies their causes. The individual countries are ranked in the paper according to the long-term average of the amount of their agricultural produce per unit of area into seven segments, and the relation between the input of fixed assets, intermediate consumption, labour force, levels of animals, and other aspects are identified for the creation of agricultural production. In terms of its performance, the Slovak agriculture ranks in the last but one seventh segment and in comparison with the advanced countries, it shows a low input of fixed assets, intermediate product,...

Integrated assessment of crop productivity based on the food supply forecastingOriginal Paper

Waldemar BOJAR, Leszek KNOPIK, Jacek ŻARSKI, Renata KUŚMIEREK-TOMASZEWSKA

Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(11):502-510 | DOI: 10.17221/159/2014-AGRICECON  

Climate change scenarios suggest that long periods without rainfall will occur in the future often causing instability of the agricultural products market. The aim of the research was to build a model describing the amount of precipitation and droughts for forecasting crop yields in the future. In this study, the authors analysed a non-standard mixture of gamma and one point distributions as the model of rainfall. On the basis of the rainfall data, one can estimate the parameters of the distribution. The parameter estimators were constructed using the method of the maximum likelihood. The obtained rainfall data allow confirming the hypothesis of the...

Empirical tests of sale theories: Hungarian milk pricesOriginal Paper

Zoltán BAKUCS, Imre FERTŐ

Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(11):511-521 | DOI: 10.17221/168/2014-AGRICECON  

The paper tests various predictions of the sale theory literature, using the retailer specific price data in Hungary. Besides being set in a New Member State, characterised by rather different history of retailing than the established market economies, one of the main innovations of this paper is the comparative assessment of price promotions of two homogenous, every-day products different only with respect to their perishability: one litre boxed and one litre durable fluid milk. Using a battery of empirical techniques from the simple summary statistics, the distribution analysis to the discrete choice models and the co-integration, there is concluded...

Efficiency change in North-East China agricultural sector: A DEA approachOriginal Paper

Shiwei LIU, Pingyu ZHANG, Xiuli HE, Jing LI

Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(11):522-532 | DOI: 10.17221/233/2014-AGRICECON  

A non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique was applied to investigate the degree of efficiency and efficiency change of prefecture-level cities in the North-East China from 2000 to 2012. Mean pure technical efficiency in a DEA model with the number of agriculture was 0.79, indicating that there is a big potential for a more efficient input utilization in agricultural productivity. Decomposition results of the Malmquist index indicated that the average productivity (MALM) growth at 8.0 percent annually over the entire period in the North-East China and the major source of growth was the technical change. In order to stimulate the productivity...

Do farmers' old age pension programs affect farm production? Empirical evidence of dairy farms in TaiwanShort Communication

Hung-Hao CHANG, Jiun-Hao WANG, Ashok K. MISHRA

Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(11):533-541 | DOI: 10.17221/244/2014-AGRICECON  

Although a considerable body of literature has examined the determinants of farm production, little is known about the role of the farmers' pension program. This study contributes to this knowledge gap by assessing the impact of the farmers' pension payments on farm production and the labour allocation using the Old Age Farmers' Pension program in Taiwan as a case study. In particular, this study quantified the effect of pension payments on the labour allocation of the farm operator and other family members, hired labourers, as well as on the farm production. A unique sample of 465 dairy farms was drawn from the Agricultural Census survey in Taiwan...