On the verge of EU accession, Polandâs agricultural sector is characterised by a number of distinct structural weaknesses, which are a major reason for the unsatisfactory income situation of rural households. Among these weaknesses are that farm productivity is substantially below EU standards,...

The paper empirically investigates credit access and borrowing costs in Poland's rural financial market. We conduct an econometric analysis based on cross-sectional survey data including formal loans taken in the period 1997-1999. A hedonic regression of the effective interest rate, comprising...

On the basis of portfolio selection theory, this paper finds that whole-farm risk must be regarded as a major reason for the low level of credit flow to agriculture in North-western Kazakhstan. A quadratic programming model was used in order (a) to demonstrate the comparatively high overall risk...

The aim of this paper is to empirically analyse the effects of governmentally promoted credit access on the investment behaviour of credit rationed farmers. This is done by specifying an empirical investment equation which is estimated on a cross-sectional sample of Polish farm household data....

Empirical analysis of rural credit market failure has been of key scientific and political interest in recent years. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of various methods for measuring credit rationing of farms employed in the literature. Furthermore, based on a common analytical...

The effects of cross-compliance depend on the strategies of participation/compliance of farmers, as well as on the ability of public administration to design appropriate mechanisms of control and sanctions. The objective of this paper is to present a reference framework for the analysis of...

Welfare economics as the traditional, prescriptive theory framework used in agricultural economics has been criticised by institutional economists as being largely irrelevant to real-world policy issues. We therefore ask how normative statements are possible within an economic theory framework...

Research on agricultural development in China has increasingly paid attention to the potentially negative effects of highly fragmented farm structures. This study provides a deeper theoretical understanding of the linkages between land fragmentation and off-farm labor supply and investigates...

Based on farm panel data we empirically investigate the determinants of Polish farm households 'flexibility from 1994 to 2001. We focus on scale flexibility (adjustment in production volume) and scope flexibility (adjustment in product mix). The findings of our fixed-effects regression provide...