Diversification has been increasingly recognized as a rewarding farm strategy through which farmers produce on-farm non-agricultural goods and services. In doing so, farmers employ farm inputs (capital, labor, and land) in products other than agricultural goods, with the aim to sell them in the market and increase their income. While a significant body of literature has explored the drivers affecting the adoption of diversification activities, so far little attention has been given to the impact of such adoption on the technical and financial performance of farms. This article intends to provide empirical evidence on the impact of on-farm non-agricultural diversification on the financial performance of family farms in Italy, by using a nation-wide sample of agricultural holdings based on the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) data. We estimated a fixed effects-instrumental variable panel model to deal with two potential sources of bias: self-selection in the diversification strategy and simultaneity, due to the fact that farmers often decide to diversify with outcome expectations in mind. Our findings show that in Italy the diversification strategy has a positive impact on the financial performance of family farms, which is second in magnitude only to that of land growth strategy. Our results also confirm the positive impact of efficiency and clarify that education has a positive return to investment when it is specialized in agriculture.

The objective of this paper is to provide an empirical investigation into the decision to participate in rural landscape conservation schemes in Italy. Although the high emphasis given to this issue and the increasing resources devoted to the landscape conservation schemes in the Rural Development Programmes (RDP) implemented by the Italian regions, farmers' participation is still very low. A better understanding of what motivates farmers to participate may help to increase adoption of the scheme and the effectiveness of the scheme design itself. In this paper we use data from 2149 household farms located in three Italian northern regions—Alto Adige, Lombardy and Piedmont—extracted from the Farm Accountancy Data Network sample, to estimate a discrete choice model aimed at identifying the variables that affect the probability of participating in a landscape conservation scheme. The model results indicate that participation correlates to farmer income. In addition to this, the probability is influenced by farm characteristics; mainly the use of organic farming practices, specialisation in livestock production and location of the farm in mountain areas.

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The agri-food sector is a key component of the Italian economy and the Made in Italy products are altogether the core of it with a strong export propensity. This paper analyses the recent export performance of the Made in Italy as a whole and at product level. The analysis is based on the conjoint measure of export specialization (RCA) and sophistication (Prody). Results show that the Made in Italy aggregate is performing well but, at the same time, which single products face significant difficulties. On the one hand, this is the case for those items for which Italy is improving its specialization, but international competition is increasingly based on price, thus reducing profitability (e. g. prepared vegetables, chocolate products, blue cheeses). On the other hand, there are products whose sophistication is growing, and remuneration perspectives rise with it, but for which Italy is eroding its comparative advantage (e. g. ice creams, pasta, grape and wine > 2lt).