The Economic Well-being of Farm Households in Germany

Sabrina Bethge, Jost-Frederik Wendt and Sebastian Lakner

German Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2021, vol. 70, issue 04

Abstract: In this study, we explore the economic well-being of farm and nonfarm households in Germany. We ap-plied an indicator that combines households' disposa-ble income and net wealth consisting of financial as-sets and real estate to data from the Income and Con-sumption Survey (EVS) 2018. We found that the in-come available to farm households can support a standard of living equal to that of nonfarm (employed) households. Wealth affects households' economic well-being in both directions: farm households and workers/employees would be better off if their house-hold income would assess their economic status. The opposite trend occurs for unem-ployed and pension-ers/retirees. However, the analysis of farmers' well-being requires income data of multiple years regard-ing the income volatility of self-employment in agri-culture. Consid-ering wealth to assess farm house-holds' economic well-being means paying attention to their farm assets because they are highly intertwined with the household. The EVS misses farm char-acteristics and a reliable number of farmers' observa-tions to assess their economic well-being over time to derive agricultural policy implications. Hence, there is currently a lack of statistical data and evidence to achieve the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 's second objective to pro-vide income support in a tar-geted manner.

Keywords: Consumer/Household Economics; Farm Management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:gjagec:343305

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.343305

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