Farm productivity and efficiency in the CEE applicant countries: a synthesis of results

By Matthew Gorton, S. Davidova. 2004

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article draws together results from farm efficiency studies in six Central and East European countries that are part of the EU enlargement process. The main questions addressed concern whether there is a clear superiority of one organisational type, namely, family farms, over corporate structures (production co-operatives and various types of farming companies) and the nature of the relationship between size and farm efficiency. Results from empirical research show that there is no clear cut evidence of corporate farms being inherently less efficient for all farming activities than family farms. Where significant differences have been found in favour of family farms against the average corporate farm, the best corporate farms still tend to perform as well as the best family farms. As far as size in concerned, in countries in transition where small family farms are well established and managed continuously by the present farm household, they appear to be less inefficient compared to larger cohorts as against countries where small family farms are a relatively new phenomenon.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4543b7356f1125cfd9b9357c553f9c6c94bc48e1

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

Land Sales and Rental Markets in Transition: Evidence from Rural Vietnam (2003, neutral): “This can give rise to a positive relationship between farm size and productivity, as is confirmed by studies from environments characterized by high risk (Kevane, 1996; Dorward, 1999; Bezemer, 2004) or where capital intensity is high (Rezitis, Tsiboukas and Tsoukalas, 2003; Schumacher and Marsh, 200”
Technical Efficiency among Peasant Farmers Participating in Natural Resource Management Programmes in Central America (2009, background): “Gorton and Davidova (2004) suggest that these variables should be classified into two major groups: (i) human capital and (ii) structural factors .”
The Shifting Patterns of Agricultural Production and Productivity Worldwide (2010, background): “Other studies on a wide variety of countries performed farm-level productivity analyses based on farm survey data (see Gorton and Davidova 2004 for a review).”
Technical efficiency in farming: a meta-regression analysis (2007, background): “This popu- larity is evidenced by the proliferation of methodolog- ical and empirical frontier studies over the last two decades as shown in the reviews by Battese (1992), Bravo-Ureta and Pinheiro (1993), Thiam et al. (2001), and Gorton and Davidova (2004).”
De-mystifying family farming: Features, diversity and trends across the globe (2015, background): “On such small farms, both the proportion of land under production and the production per unit area may be greater than on large farms with limited amounts of hired labour facing troubles of labour supervision (Gorton and Davidova, 2004; Hazell, 2005; Woodhouse, 2010).”
The future of small farms in Asia (2016, positive): “…countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, where scale economies are observed (Key and Runsten, 1999; Rozelle and Swinnen, 2004; Gorton and Davidova, 2004; Helfand and Levine, 2004; Eastwood, Lipton, and Newell, 2009; Deininger and Byerlee, 2012). labour-saving production…”
Application of a double bootstrap to investigation of determinants of technical efficiency of farms in Central Europe (2008, background): “It has been widely discussed in relation to transition countries due to its important policy implications regarding the post-reform land redistribution in Central Europe (Gorton and Davidova 2004).”