Agricultural Economics, 2015 (vol. 61), issue 5

Impact of the Rural Development Programme Subsidies on the farms' inefficiency and efficiencyOriginal Paper

Marie PECHROVÁ

Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(5):197-204 | DOI: 10.17221/110/2014-AGRICECON  

The aim of the paper is to assess the impact of subsidies from the Rural Development Programme of the Czech Republic for the years 2007-2013 (RDP) on the technical inefficiency and the efficiency of Czech agricultural holdings. An unbalanced panel includes 454 Czech farms and 2103 observations for years 2007-2013. The Parametric Stochastic Frontier Analysis is used to assess the technical inefficiency and efficiency. A "true" fixed effects model with RDP subsidies explaining the variance of the inefficiency term is estimated. The results are ambiguous. On one hand, the RDP subsidies contributed to the decrease of variance of the inefficiency term,...

Is there co-movement between the China and US agricultural futures markets?Original Paper

Bing Zhang

Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(5):205-213 | DOI: 10.17221/134/2014-AGRICECON  

The paper examines the co-movements between the agricultural markets of China and the US. First, the empirical findings indicate that long-term equilibrium exists between the China and US soybean futures markets but not in the wheat futures markets. Second, there exists a significant spillover effect from the US to China in the wheat futures market, but the opposite effect is not strong; furthermore, for soybean futures, the spillover effect is bi-directional. Third, there is a unidirectional leading effect by the US agricultural futures markets on the Chinese market, particularly for agricultural products weakly controlled by the Chinese government.

Price volatility spillovers among agricultural commodity and crude oil markets: Evidence from the range-based estimatorOriginal Paper

Giray GOZGOR, Cahit MEMIS

Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(5):214-221 | DOI: 10.17221/162/2014-AGRICECON  

The paper examines the price volatility spillovers among the crude oil, soybeans, corn, wheat, and sugar futures markets over the period 1/1/2006-11/29/2013. We separately investigate the periods of the pre-crisis, the crisis, and the post-crisis in financial markets. We use the Yang-Zhang estimators for the historical volatility and find that there is a volatility sprawl from the crude oil to corn markets. There is also bi-directional causality between the corn and soybeans markets. In addition, we observe significant volatility spillovers from both the soybeans and the corn markets to the wheat markets. The results are also valid in a different sub-period...

Overcoming the legacy of the past? Analyzing the modes of governance used by the Polish agricultural producer groupsOriginal Paper

Volker BECKMANN, Ilona M. OTTO, Rong TAN

Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(5):222-233 | DOI: 10.17221/190/2014-AGRICECON  

The cooperative movement in Poland has a long but difficult history, which has caused farmers to have an aversion to cooperatives. Nonetheless, in the early 1990s, the first farmers' cooperative marketing organizations, which were called agricultural producer groups, appeared in the market. These groups are bottom-up, voluntary organizations the primary purpose of which is to jointly sell their members' output. In this paper, it is investigated why the new forms of governance, namely cooperative arrangements, were chosen, and we evaluate the implications of these choices on the market success of these groups. Empirical data were collected from 62 producer...

Least developed countries - the case of BurundiOriginal Paper

Vladimír JENÍČEK, Šárka GROFOVÁ

Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(5):234-247 | DOI: 10.17221/48/2014-AGRICECON  

The contribution is focused on the food problem in the least developed countries, on the chosen areas where the overall situation is the most problematic. It deals with Burundi, belonging to the low income food deficit countries with one of the world's lowest rates of the gross domestic product per capita. The paper defines the food security situation in the global connection, representing a wide complex of economic, social, demographic, technologic and political aspects of production, distribution, shift and consumption of foodstuffs. The inter-related causes of food insecurity are mainly the long lasting civil wars, a limited access to land, environmental...