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One of the measures of the Sectoral Operational Programme Agriculture and Rural Development is focused on the diversification of agricultural activities. The analysis of the measure showed the greatest interest in financial support among the subjects aimed at agritourism and rural tourism. The field of tourism dominates also among the number of the approved projects. The share of other diversification activities is very low. The analysis of other profitable activities in the Farm Structure Census and Farm Structure Survey by the type of activities shows that the total number of agricultural enterprises with other profitable activities decreased in 2005 compared to 2001 and 2003. The total amount of agricultural enterprises with other profitable activities in the Slovak Republic reached 3 219 in 2001, 4 465 in 2003, and 2 066 enterprises in 2005. In 2005, the number of the enterprises increased in the field of craft industry, wood processing, fishery, generating energy from renewable resources and contracted work.

The article describes the competitiveness of Slovak agricultural and food products after the accession of the Slovak Republic into the EU. The analysis has shown that even despite the increased subsidization and full liberalisation of trade, the competitiveness of our products still needs to develop. The main reason behind this is the poor efficiency of production and the lack of innovation activities. Most agricultural commodities are profitable only because of subsidies. Processing industry is the main contributor to the worsening deficit of trade balance. Specific commodities with good sales potential in the EU market include cereals, malt, wheat flour, dairy products, live cattle and sheep meat.

The article deals with the analysis of food market on the level of consumer prices structure, through the identification of margins in the selected food verticals and through the analysis of consumer behaviour associated with changes in prices and income of population. The article also discusses the factors which may affect the current growing trend in prices of food in the SR and worldwide and subsequently, the reduction of gap between the Slovak and the EU prices.

The Program Period of the European Union for the years 2007-2013 is focused on the support of standardization of rural development and the creation of a space for its sustainable development. Agriculture is in the structure of production and non-production functions an important factor of social-economic development of countryside and it contributes to the increase of its growth potential. Diversification of activities in the countryside has a significant influence on the stability of settlement, the development of employment in the countryside, and the sustenance of entrepreneurial structures in rural regions.

The paper analyses the development of agrarian foreign trade of the EC/EU states in the period 1961-2006. The aim of the analysis is to evaluate the influence of the EC/EU member base enlargement on the development of the value and territorial structure of the Community agrarian trade. Additionally, the paper analyses the impacts of the accession of the particular countries on their own and the total agrarian trade of the Community with the aim to clarify the development trends which preceded the accession to the EC/EU and which subsequently appear after the accession of the given state to the Community. Development trends recorded in the case of all joined countries in the period 1973-2006 are compared and in the final part of the paper, the impacts of the enlargement of the EC/EU on the development of internal (intra) and external (extra) trade are summarised.

The aim of the paper is to present a developed spreadsheet tool for the formulation of a daily dairy cow ration. It is constructed on the basis of two linked sub-models developed on the MS Excel platform. It merges the common linear programming model and the weighted-goal programming model with a penalty function. The first sub-model is included in the tool to make an estimate of the least-cost magnitude that might be expected. The obtained result is entered into the second sub-model as the goal that should be met as closely as possible. The tool was tested at two different values of preferential weights for dairy cows with a 25 kg daily milk yield. The results obtained confirm the benefits of the applied approach. In contrast to the common linear program tools, which terminate at formulation of the least-cost ration, our tool provides more efficient rations (in both economic and nutritive terms) by fine-tuning the nutritive goals and by allowing for harmless deviations from these goals by application of penalty functions.

Czech agricultural sector undertook many great changes in the last 12 years. These changes have resulted in the creation of business structure, which, however, is still not finished due to external (market) and internal (enterprise) conditions. The main goal within these changes was to create functional efficient and competitive agricultural sector, which is to survive in ever changing global world, in particular with respect to the intention to join the unified Europe. One of the questions, which is currently discussed very often, is to what extent the current business agricultural structure is efficient in input allocation, eventually which structural changes have to be undertaken to create such effective sector. The main objective of this contribution is therefore to present findings, which were obtained within the research project processing.

The paper reviews experiences from the accession process of Poland and the Czech Republic, two countries with different accession conditions regarding the agri-food sector. The paper has two main aims. First is to discuss the scope of action in the EU and in the acceding countries from a game theoretical view. The second aim is to identify the reasons for successfully providing beneficial accession criteria. Investigating two selected agricultural sectors does this: milk and beef production. Our overall argument is that the actions, which nations and interest groups have undertaken with regard to the EU accession and future policy direction are, at least partially, a function of different external restrictions and internal national patterns; i.e., the relevance and structure of agriculture and the bargaining power of interest groups.

The article deals with characteristics of local communities and rural regions. Local communities are defined both according to the standards of population density and the number of inhabitants. In the article, there are treated especially the indicators of population development (balance of migration), economic activities of the inhabitants, unemployment rates, structures of the population according to the sector of national economy and the indicators of education. These indicators have been calculated on the basis of data of the Census 2001, municipal and regional statistics and the Department of Employment data concerning the unemployment rate.

In the year before the accession to the European Union, the Slovak agricultural sector reported a loss of SKK 2.4 billion and following a profitable year, the earnings were reduced by SKK 2.8 billion. The situation was caused by a number of reasons, namely reduced sales of agricultural products, damage resulting from adverse weather effects (cold weather, hail, drought and swine fever), as well as widening of the price gap compared to the year before (increasing input prices in agriculture and decreasing purchase prices of agricultural products, especially in livestock production). Legal entities and natural persons experienced mixed business success. While 51% of legal entities made profit, the figure rose to 76% in the group of natural persons. Both the agricultural cooperatives and trading companies performed with a loss. The loss per hectare of agricultural land (a.l.) was substantially lower in the case of business companies. Natural persons - private farmers were profitable over the period. The gap between the profitable and loss-making enterprises has widened. Some 60% of profitable enterprises owned by legal entities made only a small profit below SKK 0.5 million. The loss-making performance was typical for more productive areas of Slovakia. This was related to stronger effects of adverse climate in 2003.

The incorporation of Czech agrarian sector in the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU means also the application of so called "European Model of Agriculture" which reacts to a basic requirement of socially balanced and sustainable agriculture which contributes to maintenance and an improvement of the European agricultural cultural landscape. In connection with it, a new strategy of agrarian policy was set according to which the orientation of Czech agrarian sector changes in a principal way, which was focused up to now only on the production function and also its other functions become more important, above all in the environmental and social, so non-production area. One of the aspects of multifunctional agriculture is an organic agriculture, a system which fulfills visions of sustainable agriculture.

Some of agriculture-food sector information systems are characterised by a high complexity and a large size. There are often many alternative solutions or technologies (implementation methods) and more then one possible way or approach to an information system design. Individual alternatives could considerably differ by their properties, e.g. costs of design of initial functionality, development and operational costs, run-time costs and technical parameters of the resulting information system (e.g. the access time). Unfortunately, existing metrics for quantification of this task usually do not deliver precise results but a rough estimate depending on many variable conditions. The paper will outline typical implementation methods and show approaches to assessment and comparison of certain types of properties of information systems for a computer support for management of large data systems, which use relational database. Authors presented part of these results also at the Agrarian Perspectives conference 2004 in the Applied Informatics session (Vrana I., Vrána J. 2004).

The Czech agricultural policy after the EU accession is the set of both the EU and national measures related to the Czech agro-food sector. The paper defines possible scenarios of the agricultural policy developments in 2004-2013 and presents expected impacts of the policy scenarios on the Czech farm structure and land usage.

The paper is focused on the performance measurement of the Support and Guarantee Fund for Farmers and Forestry (SGFFF) as the main instrument of capital reinforcement of Czech agricultural enterprise development. Its principles as well as the function from the point of view of agricultural enterprises, restructuring and allocation of resources and the reason why the subsidies of the supported loans' interest rates have been employed are cleared up there. The results are discussed upon an analysis of the Fund's activity. According to them, it can be claimed that the Fund has became an important part of supports for the agricultural sector development in the last ten years. From the point of view of the criteria of supported loans allocation, it was ascertained that the level of support has not been derived from the different natural and soil qualities primarily. The economic results and a high level of the prosperity have been evaluated as the main criteria for the decision-making system regarding an effective restructuring of agriculture and improving its competitiveness.

This study has focused on two main tasks: verifying the suitability of using stochastic frontier analysis on a transforming sector, and providing empirical evidence to explain the technical efficiency structure among farms in the time period 2000-2004. Two stochastic frontier model specifications were employed, the Battese and Coelli 1992 specification with the systematically time-varying inefficiency effect, and the Battese and Coelli 1995 one stage specification explaining technical inefficiency based on farm-specific variables. Our analyses were carried out at the commodity level, wheat production, where the accessibility of a data panel allowed us to enrich the calculation of the level of technical efficiency by the analysis of productivity changes within the chosen period of time, supports this idea as well.

The article is concerned with the analysis of the role of credit rationing in Czech agriculture on the case of large agricultural enterprises. The part of results, first presents the author's derivation of the theoretical model (model CR-AS), which represents a good tool (approach) for the analysis of credit rationing on sector level. Second, the focus on large agricultural enterprises and relevant characteristic of agriculture ask for a small adjustment of the derived model CR-AS in the part of model application. Third, the adjusted model is expressed numerically by the employment of econometric methodology. The estimation of the model is made per partes. The co-integration is used for fitting the Cobb-Douglas production function, which embodies the long run production characteristics of large agricultural enterprises. The CR^Dcurve is derived based on the stability assumption of the production function that is essential considering the recursive nature of the model. Finally, the specified model is employed in the ex-post analysis of the impact of credit rationing on production level of large agricultural enterprises. The outputs of the analysis suggest that, in average, the group of large agricultural enterprises might not be directly influenced by possible presence of credit rationing on the agricultural loan market. Nevertheless, that might not be the case of small and middle enterprises. The analysis continues with the investigation of possible meeting of credit rationing within both the group of large agricultural enterprises and the group of small and middle enterprises and stresses his implications. Furthermore, the role of the PGRLF (Support and Guarantee Farm and Forestry Fund) is analysed and discussed on the subject of reduction of credit rationing phenomena on the agricultural loan market.

This paper analyses the enforcement of the 2003 CAP reform in 5 countries of the West European Union: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom. The reform gives multiple possibilities of adaptation at a national or regional level. Two standard strategies are foreseen: that of the States which mobilized to the maximum the innovations that the reform allowed, and that of the States which have chosen the option of a minimal application, to limit the effects of reorientation of the productions (maximum sectors remain coupled) or of the redistribution of the payments (historical references). The great diversity of the conditions of agricultural production is one of the main explanations of the differences of enforcement of the reform. We analyse the first impacts of the reform. One can generally expect that the market of entitlements will be a priori limited, because of the links of the entitlements to land. The regionalisation of the calculation of the entitlements is incontestably the mechanism, which introduces the most redistributive effects, compared to the individual historical references. We examine also the consequences of the Single Payment System (SPS) on land rent and land market.

To determine the countryside, different criteria can be used from the simplest one - the population density - to more complex ones like the economic indicators or the combination of factors characterizing the particular types of municipalities or regions. Generally, it is possible to divide these indicators into subjective and objective ones and further to categorize them according to other properties. The objective of this article is to collect as much information as possible about the methods of defining the borders of rural areas used in the Czech Republic and to set these criteria into a system. We would like to evaluate the applicability of these criteria and to state the advantages and disadvantages of their use. The article also compares statistical data related to the selected features characterizing countryside.

The paper analyses the evaluation of agricultural and farm support in the OECD countries and its differentiated development in the respective countries. This is important, because the effect of subsidies on production, trade, income as well as environment, directly depends on the way how this subsidies are disbursed to the farmers. Another object of the analysis are the differences in the level of support between different commodities that may lead to deformations.

This report deals with the problems of the status of rural households in the stratification system of the post-socialist Slovak society. The authors take as the basis the concept of associated classification and knowledge about the trends in the development of the social structure of Slovak society in the transformation period. The processing of empirical data from the survey research of rural households in three districts served as an example to compare the classification of households within the economic and socio-cultural lines by the means of the selected indicators. The analysis refers to the inconsistency of the stratification of rural households according to the economic and income statuses as well as education, population and socioeconomic qualities which are significantly conditioned by the regional position and situation. The representative types of rural households for the individual social strata are characterized in the conclusions. They are characterized with regard to the used criteria.

The aim of the paper is the evaluation of the present sale of the chosen organic products in the condition of the Czech Republic. The sale analysis is made according to the structure of plant and animal products with the help of both qualitative and quantitative evaluation parameters as for example the amount of production and their prices, sales conditions and the used distribution channels. The part of the paper is also analyses of present state of demand for chosen organic foodstuff and of the consumer's interest in organic foodstuff. The attention is paid mainly to the recognition of the consumer's interest in organic foodstuff, for the consumer's interest is the limit factor of the demand for organic products.

The aims of this study are to determine the cooperation of milk producers and to analyze the milk marketing structure in Menemen-Izmir, West Turkey. According to the results of this study, 70% of the producers are the shareholders of the cooperatives, 49.2% of the producers are members of the National Chamber of Agriculture. In this study, 47.20% of total milk production in the farms is marketing to street sellers, 36.11% is marketing to small scale milk processing plants, 10.1% is marketing directly to consumer and 6.6% is marketing to dairy factories. Also, feed prices in the market are 5% higher than the prices of cooperatives. The main problems related to organization and marketing together are the lack of knowledge in production, low milk prices and the high cost of production.

The paper focuses on the problematic issues of tourism, namely on the area of relationships among travel and tourist agencies and their clients. It analyses the current situation and defines key problems that emerge from the insufficient legislative adjustments in the area of tourism entrepreneurship regulated by the Act 159/1999 of the Collection that concerns some conditions of tourism business, as well as by the amendment of this law from year 2006. The ambiguous interpretation of the law concerning the conditions of entrepreneurship in tourism area and other facts that emerge from this, such as the rise of asymmetrical information, untransparency of the market as well as the insufficient protection of the consumer-client of travel agencies - all these issues represent key problems of the contemporary practice that this paper intends to react to and it also aims to suggest a potential solution to them. The theory of strategic alliances and the theory of signalling behaviour are used as a methodological basis for solving the problems mentioned above.

www technologies are developing very fast. The new technologies make possible the easier creation of the web applications, which support business activities. Small and medium size enterprises, which serve as the driving force for innovations and thus for economic development, can utilize these technologies for the creation of relatively inexpensive applications, which can be tailor-made for the given enterprise by using the open source software (OSS). This contribution presents several practical examples of how to create - update - the web site of an enterprise and how to supplement it with an e-shop option. Examples from the area of flower selling have been selected.

In the paper, the level of assets and long-term tangible property as well as the development of own and foreign capital, and the development of sales are evaluated in the time period 1992-2004. An analysis of internal financing resources - profit after taxation, reserves, depreciations of long-term property - was done for the years 2000-2005. The monitored items are calculated for agricultural enterprises of legal entities. Further selected factors are evaluated, which influence the property and capital structure of an enterprise.

The article presents the evaluation of multifunctionality of Czech agriculture and its individual farm categories in the period of 2003-2005. It compares the situation before and after the EU accession. The assessment is based on the set of indicators for the three elementary axes of multifunctionality: economic efficiency, relations to environment and relations to rural development. Applying the presented method of multi-criterion evaluation and during the period of 2003-2005 on average, the highest level of multifunctionality is found in the category of farms of physical persons with 101-300 ha (score 174) and the lowest level in the category of collective farms - cooperatives and joint stock companies (score about 115). However, compared with the pre-accession period, the collective farms show the highest growth of the score (by 17%) after the EU accession.

The article supplies the information concerning the transformation of informal MFIs to formal ones (Srnec, Havrland 2006). It underlines some risks of finance investors to the microfinancial segment of money market. Financial investors influence the possible development of MFIs and reverse. In contrary, MFIs can farcify or weaken the economic development in local areas and thus to decrease the financial effect and farm sustainable development.

The purpose of the situation analysis of the external environment is to find what is happening in the company environment now and in the future and how these factors will influence the activities and existence of the company. The paper deals with a situation analysis of the external environment of a specific company. This paper describes the external environment of the United Bakeries company using the STEPE analysis and in addition a situation analysis of the external environment was made. Next the probability estimation of the occurrence and influence of the factors is made for today, and for the near and long-term future.