Книги

Russia’s agro-food sector has changed significantly during the reform period. Firstly, the agricultural production were transformed and the downstream sector has been privatized. The industry has become more sensitive to market signals.

Secondly, the state role in food distribution was diminished sharply and a new market infrastructure of the food chain has emerged. Thirdly, the food deficit typical for the centrally-planned economy was almost eliminated. These changes were achieved at the expense of a notable fall in agro-food output and the food consumption of citizens. At the same time, from 1997 to the first half of 1998, there have been a number of signs for a recovery of the agro-food economy, though the recovery was slow and even reversed by the impact of the financial crisis that hit Russia in the second half of 1998.

Научное издание представляет материалы международной конференции, проведённой АПЭ в Голицыно 1-2 октября 1999 года. Рассматриваются результаты приватизации земли и реорганизации сельскохозяйственных предприятий в ходе российских аграрных реформ.

В книге даётся анализ, главным образом, институциональной структуры рынка, то есть структуры продовольственной цепи, ее эволюции, а также, частично, функции рынка и его эффективности. Отмечается, что центральной задачей российской аграрной реформы является переход от централизованно планируемой системы к рыночной. Это предполагает не только формирование рыночно ориентированных производителей непосредственно в самом сельском хозяйстве, но также и создание принципиально иной рыночной инфраструктуры, позволяющей эффективно перемещать продукт от поля к конечному потребителю, с одной стороны, и с другой – также эффективно доставлять рыночную информацию, сигналы от потребителя к производителю и обратно. Подчёркивается, что если проблема реорганизации сельскохозяйственных производителей в России изучена в отечественной и западной литературе достаточно хорошо, то проблема формирования российских агропродовольственных рынков остается крайне слабо исследованной. Подчёркивается также, что исследование рынков в классическом понимании традиционно включает в себя: анализ степени конкурентности рынка, институциональной и функциональной структуры рынка, условий рыночного равновесия и эффективности рынка.

Subsistence agriculture in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has only recently gained interest from agricultural economists. Their origin, their future and even their definition is still not well elaborated. This paper tries to throw light on the issue of subsistence farming in CEE. It first discusses the theoretical and empirical background of subsistence agriculture. This part is followed by a typology of subsistence farming as found in CEE. Analysis considers several hypotheses on the cause of subsistence agriculture, among them the structure of land ownership, market imperfections and lack of alternative income sources or low opportunity costs of labour respectively. Of all these hypotheses, only the latter can be proofed empirically, which is done by a nonlinear regression analysis. The paper concludes that this gives reason to argue that rather economic problems than specific problems related to the agricultural structure in CEE determine the degree of subsistence farming. Consequently, structural and social policies rather than agricultural policies like market intervention are to be considered.

Theoretical and simulation results clarify the role of forward procurement contracting as a determinant of spot price levels and volatility. A stylized model determines market share across quality when procurers forward contract to manage quality risk. Actual supply is specified as price dependent and stochastic. Simulation examines sensitivity of spot price level and volatility to extent of forward contracting, risk aversion, and ability to adjust spot market demand (recontracting).

The results show that as forward contracting increases mean spot price decreases and variance increases. This effect increases as risk aversion decreases and as the extent of recontracting adjustment in spot demand decreases.

Agri-environmental schemes are offered by a regulator to farmers. The farmer is to produce certain environmental goods and gets a pecuniary compensation for doing so. The problem of designing optimal schemes is dealt with using mechanisms design theory. This paper considers the situation where the regulator faces a budget constraint on total payments to farmers. It is shown, that 2 results of standard mechanisms design theory are affected when a budget restriction on total payments is present.
1) The ”no distortion at the top rule“ does not always hold.
2) It is not always optimal to o.er heterogeneous farmers heterogeneous argi-environmental schemes.

Last decades have seen the development of a new rural policy. Different problems occurring in rural areas have pushed the EU Commission to draft policy instruments aiming to address them. However this rural policy path has not always been explicit neither has followed a continuous trend but rather has seen a series of forward and backward steps. Given the lack of a method to establish the relevance and the level of political acceptance of EU rural policy, a methodology has been developed. This methodology has tried to identify the EU political procedure trend, though this is not a formal sequence, and to establish a classification of different events according to a proposed hierarchy. Several EU documents, decisions, directives and financial resource allocations have been analysed. Within the review performed, each rural policy milestone has been classified following the proposed hierarchical chart. This has enabled the drawing of the different backs and forwards taken by this process. Besides, it has lead to the interpretation of the rural policy instruments current position in relation with other European policy instruments.

Agricultural productivity in 41 Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries from 1960 to 1999 is examined by estimating a semi-nonparametric Fourier production frontier. Over the four decades the estimated rate of productivity change was 0.83% per year, although the average rate from 1985-99 was a strong 1.90% per year. Former UK colonies exhibited significantly higher productivity gains than others, while Liberia and countries that had been colonies of Portugal or Belgium exhibited net reductions in productivity. We measure a significant reduction in productivity during political conflicts and wars, and a significant increase in productivity among those countries with a measure of political rights and civil liberties.

This paper analyses empirically the effect of "hold-ups" on capital investment in farms using a sample of 318 Hungarian enterprises, surveyed over 1997. A negative relationship arises between capital investment and the incidence of hold-up behaviour. This relationship is affected by farm’s wealth and liquidity position, the quality of legal enforcement of contracts, by whether farms have contracted sales to foreign processors, and whether they are established as successors t pre-reform organisations rather than start-up businesses.

This paper shows that imperfections in the credit market and insecurity of property rights affect nonuniformly the investment of younger and established microenterprises in Russia. The empirical analysis of investment is based on the liquidity constraint model but also accounts for the added challenged that the weak institutional structure and the small size of the enterprises pose. Investment in younger firms is most constrained by the availability of funds, while investment in more established microenterprises is affected by the ability of the entrepreneurs to “secure” their property rights by paying bribes. Financial institutions are unable to distinguish good from bad borrowers but lend to firms that have transparent transactions.

Small farms still dominate the agricultural sector in much of the developing world and they are still significant players in the rural life of many rich countries. As part of the economic transformation process, rising labor costs drive most small farms out of business, and only part time farmers and a few small- specialized producers of higher value products survive. Historically this process has usually taken several generations to unfold, but the process may prove much faster in the future. New driver variables are quickening the pace, including the miniaturization of small farms under continuing rural population growth in poorer countries, the trade distorting agricultural policies of most OECD countries, a shift towards increasingly integrated and consumer driven markets as part of market liberalization and globalization, and the demographic impact of the spread of HIV/AIDS. The viability of small family farms is threatened today in all kinds of countries in historically unprecedented ways. Yet there are good reasons why policy makers should want to keep small farms around, and this will require deliberate policies to provide them viable development pathways in an increasingly hostile world. This paper reviews the problem and discusses appropriate policy interventions.

Intra-industry trade in agri-food products between Hungary and the EU is shown to be low and dominated by vertically rather than horizontally differentiated products, suggesting higher economic adjustment costs. Following recent empirical studies, we then test econometrically for the determinants of this trade using different measures of horizontal and vertical trade, and employing an array of popular explanatory variables. Results suggest that separating the measure of intra-industry trade into vertical and horizontal provides for better estimation and supports the contention that the determinants may differ by type of trade. In the regression analysis, the level of intra-industry trade is found to serve as a better dependent variable than the degree or share of intra-industry trade.

During recent years, dramatic changes in the world food system have led to unprecedented competition between agribusiness firms. To compete in this environment, agricultural cooperatives should invest substantially in long-term activities such as R&D and advertisement. Co-operatives have a difficult problem in acquiring equity capital because the residual claimant (benefactor) is the patron of the firm, not the investor. This organizational design poses to cooperatives three investment constraints:
a) the free rider problem,
b) the horizon problem, and
c) the portfolio problem.
Empirical analysis utilizing a latent variable structural equation model and a large dual response survey suggests that in the U.S. member-patrons are more likely to invest in co-operatives which adopt well defined property rights policies and structures than traditional co-operatives characterized by vaguely-defined property right structures. Agribusiness co-operatives in the European Union are gradually adopting long-term financing methods that possess one or more of the characteristics found in successful U.S. ‘New Generation Cooperatives.’ However, it seems that they have paid less attention in designing their organizational structures (e.g., membership policies). This may inhibit their efforts to gain a competitive advantage over investor-owned firms.

This paper analyses the impact of the dairy quota scheme on the size distribution of the Dutch dairy industry. A non-stationary Markov model approach is used, where the transition probabilities are explained by a set of exogenous (policy) variables. Using an information theoretical approach, a model is estimated for The Netherlands and used to simulate the impacts of alternative EU dairy policies. Several results emerged:
a) There is an autonomous over time decline in farm numbers (implying increase in farm size).
b) The dairy quota regime positively influences 'small' and 'medium' farm sizes;
c) Abolition of the dairy quota will negatively affect the total number of active farms and favours further increase of farm scale.
d) Targeting support according to needs increases the number of active dairy farms as compared with the status quo.

This paper considers vertical price relationships between wholesalers and retailers on five local maize markets in Benin. We show that if the common factor and the long-run disequilibrium error are not explicitly taken into account in testing the channel model, one can easily be wrong about how restrictions on the error-correction structure must be interpreted in terms of economic power in the channel. The empirical results show interesting differences between markets and reveal that retailers play a more prominent role in the price formation process than generally assumed in the literature. Retailers in the two major towns do not allow wholesalers to behave as vertical price leaders, but in the two larger rural centers, wholesalers involved in arbitrage among urban markets are able to influence price formation.