The objective of this article is to examine the association between agricultural subsidies and dairy farm technical efficiency in the European Union, and in so doing we make novel contributions to the literature. We include in the analysis nine diverse western European Union (EU) countries over an 18‐year period (1990–2007) encompassing the various Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms enacted since the inception of the EU. Further, we account for input endogeneity using an original method of moments estimator. Our results show that the effect of subsidies on technical efficiency may be positive, null, or negative, depending on the country. The analysis reveals that the introduction of decoupling with the 2003 CAP reform weakens the effect that subsidies have on technical efficiency.

This paper investigates how the various changes in the policy supporting agriculture in the European Union, i.e. the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and various types of subsidies (investment, production and rural development) affected the technical efficiency and productivity change of farms in France between 1990 and 2006. Three types of farming—field crop, dairy and beef cattle—are considered. Comparison of efficiency across periods indicates a significant reduction in efficiency in the period following the first CAP reform (1992 MacSharry reform) but an improvement in efficiency change. Econometric results related to the effect of subsidies on efficiency scores (with fixed effect models) and productivity change indices (with ordinary least squares) give ambiguous findings. The effect of a particular type of subsidy was found to be negative or positive depending on the sample’s production orientation and on the performance considered. Several methodological recommendations are drawn from the analysis for future research.

This article assesses the extent to which sampling variation affects findings about Malmquist productivity change derived using data envelopment analysis (DEA), in the first stage by calculating productivity indices and in the second stage by investigating the farm-specific change in productivity. Confidence intervals for Malmquist indices are constructed using Simar and Wilson's (1999) bootstrapping procedure. The main contribution of this article is to account in the second stage for the information in the second stage provided by the first-stage bootstrap. The DEA SEs of the Malmquist indices given by bootstrapping are employed in an innovative heteroscedastic panel regression, using a maximum likelihood procedure. The application is to a sample of 250 Polish farms over the period 1996 to 2000. The confidence intervals’ results suggest that the second half of 1990s for Polish farms was characterized not so much by productivity regress but rather by stagnation. As for the determinants of farm productivity change, we find that the integration of the DEA SEs in the second-stage regression is significant in explaining a proportion of the variance in the error term. Although our heteroscedastic regression results differ with those from the standard OLS, in terms of significance and sign, they are consistent with theory and previous research.

Our objective is to extend the latent class stochastic frontier (LCSFM) model to compute productivity change, using the robust transitive productivity Färe‐Primont index. The application is to three types of grazing livestock farms in France over the period 2002–2016. The LCSFM identified two classes of farms, intensive farms and extensive farms. Results indicate that productivity change and its components show only small differences between the LCSFM and the pooled model that does not account for heterogeneity. Differences across classes exist, but depend on farm type.

En France, la transmission en agriculture est aujourd’hui un enjeu crucial puisqu’un chef d’exploitation sur deux était âgé de plus de 50 ans en 2010 et partira ainsi à la retraite au cours des dix prochaines années. L’objectif de cet article est de contribuer aux connaissances sur les enjeux et les difficultés liés au processus de transmission en agriculture, avec la Bretagne comme cas d’étude. Une revue de littérature, complétée par des entretiens auprès d’acteurs publics et professionnels intervenant dans le parcours de transmission et d’installation, a permis de mettre en lumière certains aspects clés, confirmés par une enquête exploratoire auprès de 15 agriculteurs installés depuis moins de cinq ans et de 25 agriculteurs pouvant partir à la retraite au cours des dix prochaines années en Bretagne.