Over fifteen years have elapsed since the transition from the centrally planned economic system started in the early 1990âs. During this time agricultural and rural areas of Central and Eastern Europe have undergone profound structural changes with wide variations in the degree of...

Flexibility can be considered as a crucial factor of competitive advantage, especially under conditions of dynamically changing environments. Based on the classical microeconomic definition of flexibility, as introduced by Stigler, and some recent concepts developed in the production economics,...

This paper deals with the estimation of a random coefficient model. The virtue of this approach is that it considers firm heterogeneity, which conventional SFA models do not. When the model is applied to Polish farms, the results indicate that the conventional random and fixed effect models...

This paper investigates the flexibility of the Polish farming sector during a transition period. Flexibility is considered to be a farm’s ability to change output by sustaining average costs. We argue that flexibility is a crucial factor in farmers’ competitive advantage, especially under...

The key question of this paper is why farmers in Kosovo leave land fallow when the total land of their farms is rather small and households are rather large. In order to elicit some barriers to land utilisation in Kosovo, the paper is based on a comprehensive survey carried out in 2005...

A set of dynamic DEA models is applied to investigate the determinants of farm size of Moscow oblast corporate farms in the period 1996-2004. New institutional economics is found to be more relevant to explaining farm sizes and their changes than the neo-classical framework. The results prove...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

This paper presents an analysis of agricultural contracts using a transaction costs approach. We contend that in a context of modern agriculture, with well defined property rights, agricultural contracts must balance costs and benefits, aligning tenant and landlord incentives towards a similar...

It is widely believed that not only a Green Revolution in a crop sector but also a White Revolution in a dairy sector has generated the great momentum of agricultural development in India since the late 1960s. However, due to the dominance of sector-specific analyses, the importance of the...

Certified organic production by small-scale farmers in developing countries is increasingly promoted as an opportunity to access a growing and dynamic market, while at the same time, enhance productivity and improve incomes. Nevertheless, adoption has been limited. The economics literature...