The productivity of family and hired labour in EU arable farming

Mathias Kloss () and Martin Petrick

No 183041, 2014 International Congress, August 26-29, 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of labour force composition on productivity in EU arable farming. We test the heterogeneity of family and hired labour for a set of eight EU member states. To this end, we estimate augmented production functions using FADN data for the years 2001-2008. The results reject the notion that hired labour is generally less productive than family workers. In fact, hired labour is more productive than family members in countries traditionally characterised by family farms, namely France, West Germany and Poland. Here, an increase in reliance on hired labour or the shift of family labour to more productive tasks could raise productivity. This finding calls into question a main pillar of the received family farm theory. In about half the countries, there are no statistically different effects of both types of labour. For the United Kingdom, we find the classical case with family labour being more productive than hired labour. In this situation supervision by family members could increase productivity.

Keywords: Labor and Human Capital; Productivity Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 8
Date: 2014-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-eur
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The productivity of family and hired labour in EU arable farming (2018)
Working Paper: The Productivity of Family and Hired Labour in EU Arable Farming (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:eaae14:183041

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.183041

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