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Purpose: The Million Farmers School (MFS) program—also known as Kisan Pathshala was launched to impart training to the farmers by the government of the state of Uttar Pradesh (India) in December 2017. This study estimates the impact of training on agricultural knowledge of the farmers. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on household survey conducted in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, during March–May 2019. The authors employed matching methods, the two-stage least square (2SLS)-residual and endogenous switching regression approaches to control for selection bias and endogeneity. Findings: The results suggest that knowledge outcomes are significantly better among participants vis-à-vis non-participants. The results are robust to different model specifications. Further, the benefits are observed across different regions and social groups. Research limitations/implications: The MFS program can go a long way in enhancing agricultural know-how and the farmers' economic well-being, bringing a transformative change in the agricultural landscape of UP. Originality/value: This study is based on a field survey data and analyzes various aspects of the program's impact, design and implementation, and offers implementation advice for greater efficacy in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the process of structural transformation that countries go through in their development journey, the relative significance of agriculture as a sector typically shrinks over time. Nonetheless, the agricultural sector maintains its significance in terms of its trade potential and global employment prospects to this day. The extant literature largely neglects the impact of countries' land resources on agricultural trade by emphasizing agricultural farm size and land productivity nexus. This justifies the exploration of the causal nexus between countries' agricultural land resources and their agricultural exports. The study herein aims at investigating the nexus between countries' total agricultural land resources and agricultural exports for 174 selected countries over the period 1991–2019. Dumitrescu and Hurlin's (2012) test for Granger non-causality for heterogeneous panels is harnessed. Estimation results evidence the presence of bi-directional causality (feedback) between countries' agricultural land resources and agricultural exports not only in the whole panel (1991–2019) but also in subpanels too (1991–2000, 2001–2010, and 2011–2019). Overall, the results stress the strategic importance of agricultural land as a significant determinant of agricultural exports. Our study takes a unique approach and investigates if there is a cause-and-effect relationship between a country's agricultural land resources and its agricultural exports by relying on the implications of the factor endowment theory of trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the attention from COVID‐19 has been on the impacts on tourism and other service sectors; but there has been a growing interest in some agricultural and food topics, such as the decline in food away from home (FAFH) expenditures. Our work considers the importance of FAFH in the overall economy, and we also consider changes in agricultural production and trade that have occurred because of COVID‐19. We gather data on actual changes to these components, as well as similar shocks to non‐agricultural sectors, and employ a simulation model to estimate the impacts on gross domestic product (GDP). Results indicate that changes from agriculture due to COVID‐19 have had a larger effect on the overall U.S. economy than the share of agriculture in the economy at the beginning of COVID‐19. But the non‐agricultural shocks still outweigh the impacts from agriculture by a magnitude of 3. Breaking the results down along the components, we find that the loss in FAFH expenditures is the largest contributor to the change in GDP resulting from shocks to agricultural markets and conclude that agricultural production/trade markets have been very resilient during the pandemic. Our results also indicate that our model (computable general equilibrium) does reasonably well in estimating GDP compared to actual changes due to the inclusion of data on actual demand, supply, and fiscal responses to COVID‐19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews evidence of trade war impacts and emerging concerns on trade policy uncertainty. Trade war's near‐perfect pass‐through of tariffs to US prices favored producers and generated government revenue at the expense of consumers. Facing retaliation, prices and trade volumes were found to be lower for US agricultural commodities. The recent rethink on the benefits of globalization by major economies has led to uncertain policy paths wherein firms and consumers continue to make decisions. Using quarterly data, a negative association between policy uncertainty and agricultural economic indicators is affirmed with implications for future evaluation of trade war impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to volatile micro- and macroeconomic conditions and increasing competition, companies experience great difficulties in attaining required profitability. The objective of this paper is to identify the profitability determinants for Polish agricultural distributors in a recent period, i.e., 2006–2016. The potential determinants of profitability identified during the course of literature review and after interviews with industry experts are classified into internal and external. With the use of Spearman correlation ranks and regression analysis of figures relating to 24 Polish agricultural distributors, the following internal profitability determinants are identified: age, size, working capital components, indebtedness, salaries, and sales margins. Additionally, the study confirmed the influence of the following selected external profitability determinants: market share, unemployment rate, and several industry-specific variables. This paper proposes the first set of sales profitability determinants for Polish agricultural distributors. The results of this study are interesting for industry-level management.

Copyright of Gazdalkodas is the property of Herman Otto Intezet Nonprofit Kft. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Gazdalkodas is the property of Herman Otto Intezet Nonprofit Kft. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Focusing on seven major agricultural commodities with a long history of trade, this study employs data-driven analytics to decipher patterns of trade, namely using supervised machine learning (ML), as well as neural networks. The supervised ML and neural network techniques are trained on data until 2010 and 2014, respectively. Results show the high relevance of ML models to forecasting trade patterns in near- and long-term relative to traditional approaches, which are often subjective assessments or time-series projections. While supervised ML techniques quantified key economic factors underlying agricultural trade flows, neural network approaches provide better fits over the long term.

The issue of complementarity between public farm investment and private farm investment in Indian agriculture is an unsettled empirical question in the literature, which has not been studied adequately. Few studies analyzing the trends of both types of investments have produced contradictory results. Thus, this study attempts to bridge that gap, by examining the hypothesis of crowding‐in/crowding‐out effect of public sector investment on private investment. Time series data for a period of 45 years from 1971 to 2015 has been used. Adopting a 'nonlinear auto‐regressive distributive lag' (NARDL) model the study confirms a strong crowding‐in effect of public investment on private investment in short run, but relatively a weak complementarity between the two over long‐run. Moreover, the public canal intensity as a major component of public investment has been observed to have much stronger effect on private investment than the public investment itself. It is also found that private investment is constrained by its own lagged values, institutional credit and terms of trade during both short‐run and long‐run. The policy suggestion of this study calls for an immediate arrest of declining trend of public investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia’s several major mining booms since the 1840s have impacted positively on national economic growth and non-trivially on the competitiveness of other sectors of its economy. This paper shows the latter to be consistent with economic theory only when sectoral policy developments are taken into consideration. It reveals several features that make the sectoral composition of Australia’s economy unusual. One is that the manufacturing share of GDP was unusually high until protectionism was phased out from the 1970s. Another is that the farm sector continued to enjoy a strong comparative advantage despite mining booms and high rates of assistance to import-competing manufacturers. Also, the agricultural and services sectors’ shares of GDP remained fairly constant rather than diverging during 1860-1960. The paper concludes by drawing out implications for future policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the impact of natural disasters on the degree of agricultural protection using data from 76 countries thereby covering more than 70 of the most traded agricultural commodities. Theoretically, the direction of this effect is not a priori directly clear as it balances the trade-off between protecting the economic interests of the domestic agricultural sector on the one hand and ensuring food availability for the society at large on the other. Our most important findings suggest that natural disasters generally raise agricultural trade controls to favor domestic farmers. These barriers are mainly provided by limiting imports in the aftermath of a natural event. However, the protection pattern differs among countries. To be more specific, floods and storms increase agricultural protection in high-income countries, while trade barriers in many LDCs are reduced during periods of extreme drought in an attempt to diminish food scarcity. Finally, it turns out that a large part of the change in agricultural protection caused by a natural disaster is explained by a number of commodity specific particularities (i.e., food vs. cash crops). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The persistence of agricultural protectionism throughout the world is intriguing given the widely recognized benefits of free trade. The political economy literature over the last decades has considered groups' interest, politicians' preferences, and their interactions within domestic politics as the primary forces driving agricultural protection. Yet, a growing body of studies suggests that it would be judicious to weigh in consumers' or taxpayers' perspectives in deciphering the nature of agricultural protection. This study examines U.S. citizens' preferences about government intervention in agriculture and trade. Results show that they are in strong support of agricultural protection and their perceptions of national food security, family farms, environmental sustainability, and multifunctionality of agriculture play a significant role in shaping their support/opposition toward government intervention. The conventional political economy literature theorizes that consumers or taxpayers would oppose public policies that increase their tax burden; however, in the case of the farm sector, they have little incentive to voice their objections given the costs of farm programs are spread across a large number of consumers and taxpayers. U.S. citizens' support for government involvement in agriculture as reported in this and other prior studies does not lend support for such political economy explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing demand for agricultural products partly due to the high population growth requires agriculture to struggle for productivity improvement. However, productivity search is constrained by environmental preoccupations, raising the question of agricultural development models to be adopted to increase productivity while limiting environmental consequences. This paper examines the role of market orientation by assessing the effect of agricultural commodity export on greenhouse gas emissions relatively to local market oriented agricultural production model. Using panel data from 1986 to 2010 for 136 countries around the world, and accurate instrumental variables technique, the findings suggest that the proportion of primary commodity export in agricultural production increases greenhouse gas emissions. These results are robust to different sources of agricultural export and environmental data, and to the inclusion of additional control variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines U.S. citizens' attitudes toward the concept of multifunctional agriculture and their perceptions about its various attributes. While the concept has emerged as a major narrative shaping agricultural policies and WTO trade rules, there are considerable disagreements among researchers and policy-makers about what should be considered legitimate attributes of multifunctional agriculture, preventing WTO negotiations from moving forward. Results show that U.S. citizens rated national food security and environmental services as the most important multifunctional roles of U.S. agriculture, and national food security makes the largest contribution to explaining U.S. citizens' attitudes toward multifunctional agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrew Rose has long argued that a common currency has a large effect on increasing trade. Recently, Rose has called into question the reliability of this conclusion, as new techniques have emerged for estimating gravity equations. This article uses the sector-specific gravity model developed by Anderson and Yotov (2010a) to investigate if disaggregated trade can provide a reliable estimate of a common currency's effect. Disaggregating trade alone is insufficient to obtain a reliable estimate of a currency union, regardless of econometric technique, when the effect of a common currency on trade is uniform across all unions. Disaggregating the universe of currency unions with individual effects provides a reliable ranking of currency unions, independent of estimation method, by the effect that each union's currency has on increasing trade. These rankings differ across sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study has used the time series data of Australia, China, Denmark, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain, and the United States from the World Bank to estimate the agricultural economic shock of Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). We have adopted the recently developed panel data approach for policy evaluation to construct the annual agricultural growth path of Taiwan, which is mainly based on the cross-sectional correlations between the domestic and international agricultural trade markets in the absence of Taiwan's entry into the WTO. Our results have not only revealed the importance ofex postcounterfactual analysis, but also provided empirical evidence that the agricultural economic shock is not as severe as predicted by manyex antestudies. Based on these results, we have concluded that the outcome may have arisen from the slow progress of achieving agricultural trade liberalization under the WTO and the Taiwanese Government's effective adoption of phase-in periods and relative adjustment policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the effect of price risk on the US importers’ optimal allocation of agriculture imports between the major supplier, China, and other competing countries. We first modify a demand system to account for the impacts of own-price risk and cross-price risk, and then apply the model to 16 agricultural and fisheries commodities exported to the US. The estimation results show that importers are sensitive to price risks of 14 Chinese commodities. Comparisons between price risk–trade relations of agricultural and fisheries products and between trade effects of cross-price risk on Chinese goods and substitutes provide strong evidence for explaining the observed trade patterns. Our study highlights the importance of price stability in promoting international trade, especially from developing countries to developed countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian & Latin American Economic History is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of trade openness on technical efficiency of the European Union’s (EU) agricultural sector. There are no systematic theories linking trade policy to technical efficiency; hence, the relation between trade liberalization and technical efficiency is fundamentally ambiguous. Stochastic frontier analysis is used to model the relationship between EU’s production resources and agricultural output, as well as the importance of trade openness on technical efficiency of a country. The data for 16 of the 28 EU members were available for the period 1980–2007 including land, capital, fertilizer, labour, agricultural GDP, foreign direct investments (FDI), exports and import data. Results indicate that trade openness has an immediate, negative impact on efficiency in the EU agricultural sector. Over time, however, trade openness does increase efficiency. The FDI outflows increase efficiency. This suggests that an initial reduction in capital supply forces EU nations to utilize other factor inputs more efficiently. However, there is the unexamined potential that over time the depletion of capital results in a decrease in efficiency. Finally, formerly communist member-countries of the EU are found to have the lowest technical efficiency scores whereas Southern European nations have the highest efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the drivers of vertical intra-industry trade (VIIT) in Hungarian agri-food trade with the European Union (EU). It identifies three possible ways to measure intra-industry trade (IIT) flows (GHM, FF, and N methods) and defines six hypotheses to test for the drivers of VIIT with three panel data models (static, dynamic, and FEVD). The results suggest that factor endowments are negatively, while economic size is positively and significantly related to VIIT. Distance and VIIT were found to be negatively related as is commonly the case in the standard gravity model. It was also found that VIIT is greater if a New Member State (NMS) is exporting agri-food produce to an NMS, while EU accession has ambiguously influenced the share of VIIT. In general, it seems that our results are independent from model estimations and interestingly they do not differ considerably as we a priori expected. Moreover, our results seem surprisingly robust across various measurements of ITT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the long-run and short-run linkages between macroeconomic fundamentals, agricultural variables and the South African agricultural trade balance, using co-integration analysis and a vector error-correction model with yearly data from 1980 to 2011. The literature review shows that these linkages have not been empirically established for South Africa, despite the relative importance thereof in the policy process. The findings reveal that in the long run, the exchange rate, agricultural price, agricultural production and disposable income all have a significant impact on trade balance. The joint short-run dynamic impact of the lagged trade balance, lagged agricultural production, lagged exchange rate, domestic price and agricultural production explains the changes in the South African agricultural trade balance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For most of the past 10,000 years, long-distance agricultural trade has focused on crop seeds or cuttings, breeding animals, and farm production technologies, before the dramatic falls in trade costs over the past two centuries allowed the gradual addition of farm outputs in raw or processed form to long-distance trade. That process was helped or hindered in various periods and places by governments' trade-related policies. This paper traces the impact of those developments on terms of trade during the first globalisation wave to 1913 and then looks briefly at the inter-war period, before concentrating on the period since the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an introduction to the special feature on agriculture-related issues in the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) contained in this issue of Journal of Agricultural Economics. The special feature is motivated by the increased interest which these countries have received since the turn of the millennium and by the significance of agriculture in their development. It considers economic and social development in BRICs, their integration in world agricultural trade as well as environmental concerns. This article presents key figures on economic, social and agricultural features in BRICs and compares them across countries. A synthesis of the articles included in the special feature is provided by highlighting the selection of topics likely to be crucial for further development across BRICs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article uses the case study of coffee, tea and cocoa to analyse whether tariff escalation constitutes a barrier to market access that thwarts diversification efforts of developing countries into exports of value-added agricultural processed products. It also examines the extent to which non-tariff barriers act as market access barriers that constrain developing countries from developing their exports of agricultural processed products. Our analysis shows that tariff escalation is not the main barrier; rather it is the prevalence of non-tariff barriers (including domestic non-tariff barriers) that limits the ability of developing countries to increase their agricultural processed exports. This has important policy implications in terms of the emphasis that trade negotiators and policy planners should place on addressing non-tariff barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]