2,447 research outputs found
A New Chapter in the History of SRNT: The Formation of the European Chapter of SRNT (SRNT-E)--A Letter from the Presidents of SRNT and SRNT Europe
No full textDuring the last annual meeting of the SRNT Europe in Bath (UK), an important event in the history of SRNT took place. On September 6, Caryn Lerman (President of SRNT) and Christian Chiamulera (Past President of SRNT Europe) signed the agreement that established the formation of the first SRNT Chapter, the SRNT-Europe (SRNT-ESP).
A brief look into the history of the Society may help us to appreciate the importance of this event. Since 1998, when the first European conference of SRNT was organized by Karl Fagerström in Copenhagen, SRNT Europe has been a group of European members mainly active in the organization of the annual SRNT Europe meetings. Well-attended and successful conferences were hosted in London, Paris, Spain, and many other locations, typically in September/October. These meetings attracted members not only from the region but also from North America. Importantly, the SRNT Europe meetings have afforded an opportunity for researchers from non-European and developing countries to attend SRNT conferences and contribute their expertise. It could be said that ..
LAND CONSOLIDATION AS A FACTOR FOR SUCCESSFUL DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURE IN MOLDOVA
No full textSince 1991, Moldova has carried out a wide range of radical reforms affecting its social and economic system. The land reform, which was practically completed in 2000, created over 1 million landowners among the rural population. Many of them entrusted their land to managers of newly created corporate farms. Others used their privately owned land to establish independent family farms. The creation of independent family farms (so-called "peasant farms") was one of the primary goals of the land reform. More than 280,000 peasant farms have been created, averaging 1,86 hectares in size. The small size of the peasant farms, whose holdings are furthermore split into 3-4 parcels, raises considerable concerns about their long-term viability and has led to an intense public debate regarding the impacts of fragmentation. In this paper, we use the data from several recent surveys in Moldova to support the case for land consolidation. We show that, in the individual sector, larger farms produce higher family incomes and thus farm augmentation makes a positive contribution to the well-being of the rural population. We also show that, for farms of a given size, productivity increases as the number of parcels decreases. After demonstrating the economic advantages of consolidation, we proceed to discuss the actual use of various market mechanisms for land consolidation, including leasing as well as buying and selling of land. We then show that, in our surveys, farms with leased land are in fact larger than farms that rely on owned land only. This completes the logical circle of our argument: land consolidation leads to better economic performance, while land leasing is actually used as a market mechanism for consolidation, which benefits both lessees (through increased farm incomes) and lessors (through income from lease payments for their land).land consolidation, land lease, land market, Moldova, Land Economics/Use,
AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVE ENTERPRISE IN THE TRANSITION FROM SOCIALIST COLLECTIVE FARMING
No full textCooperative enterprise has appeal as a means of filling gaps in the economic institutions of the rural sectors of the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But in addition to problems that have faced cooperatives in the West because of their inherent characteristics, the Soviet-era legacy created cultural burdens that cooperatives will have to overcome. A review of countries’ experiences since 1989 indicates some commonalities in attempts to create “new cooperatives,” but also instructive differences across countries. The evidence so far is unfavorable for cooperatives in agricultural production. In marketing and input supply the current situation is more promising. In both production and marketing, the economic institutions remain in flux. Unique approaches involving cooperatives may take permanent root, but their long-term prospects are in doubt.Agribusiness,
DUALITY OF FARM STRUCTURE IN TRANSITION AGRICULTURE: THE CASE OF MOLDOVA
No full textThe duality of farm structure in Moldova is manifested by the existence of a relatively small number of large corporate farms at one extreme and a very large number of small and very small family farms at the other. “Medium-sized” family farms, the backbone of any market agriculture, virtually do not exist in Moldova. Moldovan agriculture is characterized by a much greater concentration of land in large farms than agriculture in market economies. The small individual farms on the whole are more productive and more efficient than the large corporate farms. They produce higher incomes for rural families than corporate farms. The main conclusion of the paper is that land should be allowed to flow from large corporate farms to small family farms through the medium of land markets until an equilibrium is established between the two farm sectors at a new level closer to that observed in market economies.farm structure, efficiency, productivity, land fragmentation, land concentration, farm size, Moldova, Farm Management, Productivity Analysis,
RURAL LIVELIHOODS IN ARMENIA
No full textIn this paper the structure of the rural economy in Armenia is explored from a household perspective. The paper draws on the livelihoods framework, recognizing the different capitals and activities that support rural households' livelihood strategies. Ownership of capitals and access to activities are examined in relation to the incidence of poverty on the basis of data from a recent large-scale survey of rural households in Armenia. Different measures for the outcome of livelihood strategies in terms of well-being are observed, which are consistently linked to income levels across poor and other households. Income-poor households are found to be less well-endowed especially with financial and social capital. They derive smaller income shares from economic activities, and more from dissaving and social payments. The findings are relevant to policies aimed at alleviating rural poverty.Community/Rural/Urban Development, Labor and Human Capital,
PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY OF SMALL AND LARGE FARMS IN MOLDOVA
No full textThe paper presents a comparative analysis of the productivity of small and large farms in Moldova based primarily on cross-section data from three farm surveys conducted by the World Bank and USAID in 2000 and 2003. The survey data are supplemented where feasible with time series from official national-level statistics. We calculate partial land and labor productivity, total factor productivity, and technical efficiency scores (using Stochastic Frontier and Data Envelopment Analysis algorithms) for the two categories of small individual farms and large corporate farms. Our results demonstrate with considerable confidence that small individual farms in Moldova are more productive and more efficient than large corporate farms. This finding is not restricted to Moldova, as a similar result has been obtained by other authors in Russia (2005) and in the U.S. (2002), where a recent study has found that an increase of farm size reduces, rather than increases, agricultural productivity. Policies encouraging a shift from large corporate farms to smaller individual farms, rather than the reverse, can be expected to produce beneficial results for Moldovan agriculture and the economy in general. The government of Moldova should abandon its inherited preference for large-scale corporate farms and concentrate on policies to improve the operating conditions for small individual farms. At the very least, the government should ensure a level playing field for farms of all sizes and organizational forms, and desist from biasing its policies in favor of large farms.family farms, corporate farms, comparative performance, technical efficiency, total factor productivity, agrarian reforms, transition countries, Farm Management, D24, J24, P27, P31, P32, Q12, Q15, R14,
Agricultural transition in post-soviet Europe and Central Asia after 25 years: International workshop in honor of Professor Zvi Lerman
No full text[Contents] - Ayal Kimhi: Foreword. p.iii - List of contributors. p.ix - [A. The transition scene after 25 years] - Johan Swinnen, Kristine Van Herck, Liesbet Vranken: Twenty-five years of transition and European integration: Some observations on the governance of land markets in an integrated Europe. p.3 - Csaba Csaki, Attila Jambor: After the transition: The impact of EU Membership upon the agriculture of the New Member Countries. p.17 - Ulrich Koester: Markets and morality: The relevance for transforming the agricultural sector in transition countries. p.35 - Thomas Herzfeld, Thomas Glauben, Liesbeth Dries, Ramona Teuber: Agricultural labor adjustment and the impact of institutions: Panel Data Analysis. p.53 - [B. Country transition experiences] - William H. Meyers, Kateryna Goychuk: After 20 Years of transition in Ukraine, Will the market find a way? p.77 - Leonid A. Krasnozhon: Property rights in transition: Evidence from the 1999 reform in Ukraine. p.95 - Martin Petrick: Competition for land and labor among individual farms and agricultural enterprises: Evidence from Kazakhstan’s grain region. p.117 - Utkur Djanibekov, Kristof Van Assche, Daan Boezeman, Grace Villamor, Nodir Djanibekov: Revealing the role of agricultural contracts in rural livelihoods in Uzbekistan. p.141 - Zvi Lerman: Tajikistan’s vulnerability to climate change: An agricultural policy approach. p.159 - Ayal Kimhi: Land reform and its distributional implications: The case of Georgia. p.175 - [C. Trade] - Sandro Steinbach, Mariusz Rybak: The impact of the Soviet legacy on agri-food trade in the former Soviet Union. p.195 - David Sedik, Zvi Lerman, Vasilii Uzun: Agricultural policy in Russia and WTO accession. p.217 - [D. New structures: Agroholdings and cooperatives] - Alfons Balmann, Heinrich Hockmann, Karin Kataria, Franziska Schaft: What drives the growth of agroholdings? An analysis of Russian and Ukrainian experiences. p.251 - Yoav Kislev: Agricultural cooperatives in Israel: Past and present. p.28
TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY IN RUSSIAN AGRICULTURE
No full textFor decades, Russian agriculture had had little technological progress and virtually no foreign investment, which resulted in a stable production possibilities frontier and made the sector ideally suited to production function analysis. The production function estimations reported in Chapters 10-13 add to a series of previous studies of the input/output relationship in Russian agriculture (e.g., Clayton, 1980, 1984; Gray, 1981; Johnson and Brooks, 1983), which generally followed the same methodology. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, however, the average response production functions gave way in the economics literature to more sophisticated production analysis techniques that measured not only productivity but technical efficiency as well (Aigner, et al., 1977; Bauer, 1990). Some of the major methodological advances in applying technical efficiency analysis to individual firms were made by a joint Russian-American team in Moscow in the early 1980s (Jondrow, et al., 1982; Danlin et al., 1985), but lack of data for many sectors of the Russian economy precluded the application of this technique until the end of the decade. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the initial optimistic expectation was that many sectors of the new Russian economy could rapidly achieve both higher productivity and higher technical efficiency once market forces prevailed. Our research attempts to understand why this has not happened in Russian agriculture in terms of technical efficiency.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,
Are employability skills learned in U.S. youth education and training programs?
No full textPublished in: Lerman IZA Journal of Labor Policy 2013, 2:6 http://www.izajolp.com/content/2/1/6Skills are a central source of high productivity and economic well-being. But what do we mean by productive skills? Both with regard to measurement and policy, the primary focus in the U.S. has been on academic skills, as measured by tests of reading, writing and math abilities and by educational attainment, including degrees completed. However, a new consensus is emerging that an array of non-academic skills and occupational skills may be at least as important for labor market success. After reviewing the evidence on respective roles of various types of skills required by employers, this paper examines the skill-enhancing effects of several youth programs and demonstrations, with an emphasis on how well these efforts raise non-academic skills directly through purposeful activities or indirectly as a result of other employment-enhancing services
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