Development of Total Factor Productivity in Alpine Farming - A Malmquist index approach -

J. Kantelhardt, Martin Kapfer, M. Franzel and Stefan Kirchweger

No 149897, 2013 Second Congress, June 6-7, 2013, Parma, Italy from Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics (AIEAA)

Abstract: In comparison to flatland agriculture mountainous agriculture is often shaped by small plot sizes, unfavourable climatic conditions and steep slopes. All those conditions make it extraordinarily expensive to implement new technologies and to modernise farms. Consequently our research hypothesis is that technical progress in mountainous regions is slower in comparison to flatland regions. In order to test this hypothesis we develop a model combining a Malmquist index approach with a matching analysis. We apply our model in Austria, using a panel data set comprising the data of 1034 Austrian voluntarily bookkeeping farms and ranging from 2003 to 2009. On basis of the Austrian Mountain Farm Cadastre the farms are classified into five categories expressing the degree of disadvantage which farms are exposed from being located in a mountainous area. Our results show that technical change in mountain regions is significantly lower than in flatland regions and continuously decreasing with increasing disadvantage. Matching our results shows that this result is mainly based on farm grassland share, while farm size is of minor importance. With regard to efficiency change and change of total factor productivity we do not find any significant results.

Keywords: Production Economics; Productivity Analysis; Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10
Date: 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/149897/files/158_Kapfer.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aiea13:149897

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.149897

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2013 Second Congress, June 6-7, 2013, Parma, Italy from Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics (AIEAA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().