Agricultural Economics, 2025 (vol. 71), issue 11
Analysis of the impact of farmland transfer on agricultural carbon emissions – Based on survey data from farming households in groundwater irrigation areas of Hebei Province, ChinaOriginal Paper
Baozhen Jia, Xiqin Wang, Bingqing Ran, Jingao Hu
Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2025, 71(11):579-591 | DOI: 10.17221/400/2024-AGRICECON 
Farmland transfer is a practical need for China to achieve agricultural mechanisation and modernisation, and also an important way for farmers to optimise their family resource allocation. The existing studies ignore the impact of farmland transfer on the environment, especially carbon emissions. The practical significance of this paper lies in exploring the likely mechanisms driving the effect of the farmland transfer on agricultural carbon emissions from a microeconomic perspective using data from rural households, based on the heterogeneity of land management scale. Results show: (i) Land transfer impacts carbon emissions differently. Land...
From metrics to insights: Evaluating cereal farming sustainability in Catalonia using composite index approachOriginal Paper
Mahdieh Khezri Nezhad Gharaei, Bouali Guesmi, Jose Maria Gil Roig
Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2025, 71(11):592-603 | DOI: 10.17221/462/2024-AGRICECON
Assessing the agricultural sustainability of farms is challenging, since it involves various aspects that can change over time and differ by location. This paper develops a composite index to evaluate the sustainability of cereal farming in Catalonia, Spain. Using factor analysis, we integrate 21 indicators across economic, environmental, and social dimensions based on the Farm Accountancy Data Network (2016–2021). The results show sustainability scores ranging from 2 to 5, with larger economic s farms outperforming smaller ones by 0.4 points. Five key factors explain the variance in sustainability across farms, with profitability, benefit-cost...
Nonlinear effects of bank loans on county agrifood SMEs innovation: Empirical evidence from ChinaOriginal Paper
Xi Chen, Kai Wang, Lirong Xing, Jianzhen Lu
Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2025, 71(11):604-617 | DOI: 10.17221/324/2024-AGRICECON
Innovation is the driver of sustainable business development and is essential to promote high quality econo-mic development in the country. Are more bank loans better for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) innovation? Therefore, based on mixed cross-sectional data of county sweet potato processing enterprises, this study applied the econometric model to explore the impact of bank loans on county agrifood SMEs innovation. We find that there is an 'inverted U-shaped' relationship between bank loans and county agrifood SMEs innovation. The analysis of the mechanism shows that bank loans can not only alleviate the problem of innovation financing...
The use of the game theory in the management of agroecosystem servicesOriginal Paper
Ernesto Mesa-Vázquez, José A. Aznar-Sánchez, Óscar González-Yebra, Miguel A. Gómez-Tenorio
Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2025, 71(11):618-627 | DOI: 10.17221/86/2025-AGRICECON
Agroecosystems provide a number of ecosystem services that are essential to human well-being. The valuation of these services by stakeholders offers important information that can be used to manage them more efficiently. In agroecosystems, individual stakeholder preferences can be heterogeneous and even opposing. This paper puts forward a novel analytical framework based on game theory to integrate the valuation of ecosystem services by different stakeholders into agroecosystem management. To illustrate it, the agricultural region of Los Vélez (south-eastern Spain) is used and three game modalities are applied (prisoner’s dilemma, common-pool...