HEALTH CHECK AND FARM EFFICIENCY: A COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF FOUR EUROPEAN AGRICULTURAL REGIONS

Filippo Arfini and Michele Donati

No 44785, 109th Seminar, November 20-21, 2008, Viterbo, Italy from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: The European Commission has always considered the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as a dynamic political tool that aims to link the agricultural sector with the evolving of the economic, financial, social and political dynamics that distinguish the Member States of the European Union. From this standpoint, the Health Check (HC) is much more than a simple assessment of the state of health of European agriculture; it is a drawing up of the “new rules” that are to manage the relations between farms and the market, on which the future efficiency and survival of the said farms and the production sectors that characterise entire European agricultural regions will depend. In this context, the aim of this paper is to present and analyse the "innovations" of the future CAP compared to the current subsidy management system. In particular, the impact of the modifications of the HC – relative to the methods for funding farms due to the transition to the regionalised Single (Farm) Payment Scheme (SPS) and to the new rates of modulation – on the competitiveness of farms specialised in certain production sectors of four European regions will be considered: Emilia- Romagna (IT), Kassel (DE), Anatoliki-Makedonia-Thraki (GR) and Ostra Mallansverige (SE). The assessment of the impact of the HC on the competitiveness of farms is made by taking the technical efficiency index, estimated by a DEA model, as a proxy for the capacity of farms to use factors of production to their best advantage with respect to the farming system adopted and hence to be able to be competitive with other enterprises in the same sector. At the same time, the analysis of the impact of the HC measures is carried out using the “generalised” Positive Mathematical Programming method in order to enable a comparison between European regions. The integration of the two methods applied to the data of the European FADN enables an in-depth assessment of the impacts and a critical evaluation of the goals that the Community reform proposal is expected to attain.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Political Economy; Research Methods/Statistical Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-11-12
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:eaa109:44785

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.44785

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