Книги

This study analyses the causal factors of fall in Russian farm output focusing on financial determinants. Translog production function is estimated on panel of 17653 large-scale farms for 1996-1998 period using fixed-effects and accounting for inter-regional climate differences. Output elasticities are analysed for sub-samples of crop and animal producing farms. The reserarch findings show that budget transfers to the farms are inefficient and result in taxation of farms. Farms are operating under the soft budget constraints that have to be removed to improve farm production performance.

The Russian agricultural sector has experienced many problems since the beginning of the 1990s that resulted in a fall in farm output. Employing a production function approach and, unlike other studies, farmlevel data on more than 20,000 Russian large-scale farms for the period 1995-2000, this study analyzes the impact of both production (land, labour, capital, materials) and financial (debts and budget transfers) determinants on the productivity. Inter-regional differences such as weather conditions and farm-specific features such as geographical location, management and soil quality are taken into account employing the fixed-effect estimation. The findings show that Russian farms operate under liquidity constraints that lower their productivity.

The conventional PSE’s methodology doesn’t provide adequate estimation of agricultural support for the economy in transition. In this paper we attempt to adjust PSE’s methodology for Russian economy, and also coefficients’ analysis and interpretations are adapted for transitional conditions. Investigation showed that the level of agricultural support in Russia is much lower than conventional methodology estimates.

This study compares the predictive performance of several mathematical programming models. Using the cropping patterns, yields and crop gross margins of eighteen farms over a period of five years we compare the models’ optimum solutions with observed crop distributions after the Reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy of 1992. The results show that the best prediction corresponds to a model that includes expected profit and a qualitative measure of crop riskiness. The results suggest that, in order to obtain reliable predictions, the modelling of farmers’ responses to policy changes must consider the risk associated with any given cropping pattern. Finally, we test the ability of the proposed model to reproduce the farmers’ observed behaviour with equally good performance under conditions of limited data availability.

Commercial producers, brokers, exporters and spinners dominate the wool supply chain in South Africa. Until recently smallholder farmers in the Transkei region had limited access to a profitable market outlet for their wool. In response, the South African wool industry has taken the initiative to help local farmers by building shearing sheds, under which the local association can bulk the wool and trade directly with the brokers. More direct access to the wool brokers is a prerequisite for the farmer to develop a viable business.

This article investigates on the effect of membership in the local shearing shed association on the farmers. revenue. A two-step regression model of the gross margin is used to analyse whether farmers selling through the local association have better financial records as compared to those who sell their wool to local traders. This article exemplifies how institutional innovation through local marketing associations can contribute to economic development in poor rural areas.

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.

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 addresses the potential for interlinked credit/input/output marketing arrangements for particular cash crops to promote food crop intensification. Using panel survey data from Kenya, we estimate a household fixed-effects model of fertilizer use per hectare of food crops, using an instrumental variables approach for addressing the endogeneity of participation in interlinked credit arrangements. Results indicate that households engaging in interlinked marketing programs for selected cash crops applied considerably greater fertilizer on other crops (primarily cereals) not directly purchased by the cash crop trading firm. These findings suggest that, in addition to the direct stimulus that interlinked cash crop marketing arrangements can have on small farmer incomes, these institutional arrangements may provide spillover benefits for the productivity of the farmers. other activities such as food cropping.

Retail pricing strategies incorporate promotions, sales, and rigidities. A number of models have been proposed in particular to explain the occurrence of sales. Focussing on the market for fresh foods the model by Varian and the loss leader argument seem to be intuitively best fitting to the conditions in the fresh food market.

From these models we derive several hypotheses that are tested for a unique data set of the German fresh food retail market. The data set consists of weekly prices for ten food items in 131 grocery shops over the period from 1995 to 2000. Following Varian sales should lead to reduced expenditures, while the loss leader argument assumes that consumers are lured into the shop by promotional sales which are covered by higher prices for other products. The results indicate that expenditures decrease with the number of sales in the short run but this effect is outweighed by a dynamic price adjustment thereafter.

The demand for hedging against price uncertainty in the presence of crop yield and revenue insurance contracts is examined for two French wheat farms. The rationale for the use of options in addition to futures is first highlighted through the characterization of the first-best hedging strategy in the expected utility framework. It is then illustrated using numerical simulations. The presence of options is shown to allow the insured producer to adopt a more speculative position on the futures market. Futures are shown to be performing, in terms of willingness to receive. Options are weakly performing when futures markets are unbiased, while they are more performing when futures markets are biased.

This paper is concerned with the timing of an agricultural policy reform under uncertainty. The focus is on the opportunity cost of giving up the option to wait when implementing a policy reform. Including the option value in applied policy analysis can help explain why conventional analyses may find observed policies to be Pareto-inferior. Furthermore, it explains why otherwise profitable policy reforms may be delayed. The theoretical model is applied to Norwegian agricultural policy anticipating a prospective WTO agreement. It is argued that the option value should be incorporated into applied policy analysis when high uncertainty prevails.

The objective of this paper is to empirically detect credit rationing of Polish farms. Based on cross-sectional survey data and motivated by a microeconomic farm household model, this effort is pursued by a methodology consisting of three interrelated steps. These steps include the analysis of qualitative survey data regarding farmers’ experience with bank credit, based on this an econometric estimation of internal shadow prices of credit for the credit constrained sub-sample of respondents, and finally an investigation of interdependencies between determinants of consumption and production that should be influenced by the presence of a binding credit constraint. The results of the empirical analysis consistently suggest that among the observed randomly selected Polish farms more than 40 percent of borrowers experience pronounced credit rationing by rural banks. These farms display internal shadow prices of the credit constraint of on average 190 percent net of principal. Shadow prices are significantly different from individual effective interest rates for credit that account for loan specific transaction costs. In the group of credit constrained farms, household characteristics could be proven to have a significant effect on output supply. This is evidence for a violation of separability between production and consumption decisions and thus lends empirical support to the existence of a binding credit constraint. Overall, credit constrained farm households own less and rent more land than the average, operate with a high capital intensity with regard to land, tend to have a poor credit history, and engage intensively in intra-village conversation. Generous government support via interest rate subsidisation apparently contributed little to alleviate credit rationing of farms in Poland.

In this paper, equity management practices of Italian agricultural cooperatives are described and discussed. Financial statements of 1.483 cooperatives are analyzed in order to provide empirical support to the study. Data confirm cooperative undercapitalization and disclose the existence of diversity in equity management practices even within the same business sector. Thus, in order to highlight the relations between cooperative market strategies and equity management practices a cluster analysis is proposed. Seven main strategic approaches for Italian cooperatives are identified and the emerging equity management practices are discussed. The empirical analysis supports the conclusion that a large number of Italian are implementing “perverse” approaches, such as dependence from public funding and minimization of equity and investments. Considering increasing competition, without an innovative equity management approach, the majority of the analyzed cooperative is expected to suffer of relevant competitive disadvantage.

This paper discusses the policies of agricultural finance and credit which have been implemented during the period of economic reform in Russia. An examination of various government measures reveals the pitfalls and shortcomings in their implementation. The main problem, however, lies in the fact that the government is attempting to remedy the consequences, rather than tackling the causes. The delay in introducing new methods of regulating agricultural finance and credit is aggravating the problem even more.