Determinants of farm profitability in the EU regions. Does farm size matter? | Łukasz Kryszak, Marta Guth, Bazyli Czyżewski | Agricultural Journals

Purpose: Total factor productivity (TFP) has become a prominent concept in agriculture economics and policy over the last three decades. The main aim of this paper is to obtain a detailed picture of the field via bibliometric analysis to identify research streams and future research agenda.Design/methodology/approach: The data sample consists of 472 papers in several bibliometric exercises. Citation and collaboration structure analyses are employed to identify most important authors and journals and track the interconnections between main authors and institutions. Next, content analysis based on bibliographic coupling is conducted to identify main research streams in TFP.Findings: Three research streams in agricultural TFP research were distinguished: TFP growth in developing countries in the context of policy reforms (1), TFP in the context of new challenges in agriculture (2) and finally, non-parametric TFP decomposition based on secondary data (3).Originality/value: This research indicates agenda of future TFP research, in particular broadening the concept of TFP to the problems of policy, environment and technology in emerging countries. It provides description of the current state of the art in the agricultural TFP literature and can serve as a “guide” to the field.

It is estimated that farm practices are responsible for as much as 25–30% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The scale of such emissions from agriculture depends on the model to which that sector conforms. The aim of this study was to investigate how the attributes of particular models of agriculture (i.e. labour, capital, land productivity, machinery, chemical, energy and water inputs) affect GHG emissions at the sectoral level. We test the hypothesis that the productivity of capital and labour as well as the intensity of inputs affect GHG emissions differently in countries with varying levels of economic development. The results indicate that in the poorest countries, a significant barrier to sustainable development is mechanization. In moderately wealthy countries there is a lack of stimuli to implement energy-saving technologies, while in the richest countries it is desirable that mechanization and chemicalization be reduced in favour of energy-saving technologies.

Willard Cochrane was the first to introduce the notion that farmers are on a market treadmill, which, in spite of their constant efforts to improve productivity, wears away any profits that might result. Therefore, the essence of the treadmill is that agricultural income does not grow in line with the increase in productivity. Although reasons of this phenomenon are economic in nature, it has caused a serious social problem, i.e., the relative deprivation of farmers’ income. Solving this problem is crucial for ensuring sustainable farming in its social dimension. The aim of the article was, firstly, to answer the question to what extent the concept of the market treadmill in agriculture is still valid for European countries; and secondly, to develop a sectoral model of agricultural income that would test whether the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been successfully struggling with the Cochrane’s treadmill. The authors carried out panel research in a group of 25 countries over the years 1980–2015 in various subperiods. The main conclusion was that the traditionally understood market treadmill has lost significance in Europe, which might be advocated as a long-term value-added aspect of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).