Transition and agricultural labour Swinnen, J.F.M; Dries, L; Macours, K
Agricultural economics,
2005, 2005-01, January 2005, 2005-01-00, Letnik:
32, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Reforms have strongly affected agricultural employment in transition countries but in remarkably different ways. We present a theoretical model and an empirical analysis to explain differences in ...labor adjustment during transition. We show that the differences are due to a combination of variations in initial conditions and differences in reform policies and effects. The removal of price distortions and subsidies caused wage and price adjustments during transition and a reduction in labor demand in agriculture. Surplus labor outflow from agriculture was further stimulated by the privatization of the farm assets as they improve incentives and remove constraints for optimal factor allocation and structural adjustment. The shift to individual farms, which was especially strong in labor-intensive production systems with low labor productivity in agriculture, has reduced the outflow of labor from agriculture by improving farm governance and labor efficiency, although this effect was mitigated by losses in scale economies due to disruptions and market imperfections in transition. In general, labor outflow was considerably lower on individual farms than on corporate farms, due to a combination of factors related to human capital, access to finance, and physical capital. In the last section of the article we present a general framework for understanding labor adjustments in transition countries. Specifically, we show that there are several patterns of labor transition. In one pattern, followed by, e.g., the Czech Republic and Hungary, there is initially a strong survival of the restructured large-scale corporate farms that have laid off many workers. In the second phase of transition, gradually the importance of individual farms increases. In other countries, such as Romania, the opposite has happened. In these countries there is an immediate strong shift to individual farms, while labor use increases on average in agriculture. After this initial phase, the shift to individual farms continues, albeit more slowly, and labor use in agriculture starts to decline. Finally, our analysis shows that in countries such as Russia and Ukraine much of the surplus labor is still employed by little-reformed former collective and state farms. Major adjustments await more progress in agricultural and general reforms.
Vietnam has emerged recently as one of the fastest growing economies and widely be perceived as the next transition tiger. State capacity, which is believed to be pivotal to the success of the NIC, ...is under scrutiny in Vietnam. This paper attempts to examine state capacity of Vietnam in the institutional, political, administrative and technical aspects employing examples in urban and housing development. This paper argues that despite the permeation of state machinery into every levels of society and creates an outlook of a strong socialist party state, state capacity in Vietnam is in fact rather weak. Although the country is striving hard in strengthen its capacity in various areas, such reforms are either yet to take root or being dragged by legacy of the old regime. The unique state-society relationship in Vietnam also shapes the trajectories of adaptation of state capacity in the course of rapidly changing economic and social environment.
This article analyzes efficiency and total factor productivity (TFP) change of large agricultural enterprises during their transition to a market economy in Ukraine. Efficiency is calculated by Data ...Envelopment Analysis and productivity change is measured by the Malmquist Productivity Change Index in the period between 1990 and 1999. On average, TFP declined by 6% annually, dropping a total 42%. The main reason for the observed TFP decline is a decrease in technical efficiency, which is found to be remarkably significant. At the same time there is a high variation among individual enterprises: the distribution of efficiency scores widens, which indicates that the farms diverge with respect to their economic performance. A Tobit regression analysis is conducted in which efficiency scores are related to factors such as farm type, farm size, initial conditions, and legal form.
In this paper, I examine the patterns of economic voting in 2002 and 2006 city president elections in largest Polish cities. I draw on the conceptual distinction between "conventional" and ..."transitional" economic voting. While the former concept stresses a general positive link between economic welfare and the results gained by incumbents, the latter, developed in course of studies on the post-communist countries, emphasises a negative relationship between welfare and the electoral fortunes of post-communist parties and candidates. Relying on aggregate-level data relating to 2002 and 2006 city president elections, I conduct analyses suggesting that both types of economic voting can be observed at the local level in Poland. On one hand, the electoral achievements of incumbents in the cities with high average wages tend to be greater than in the case of the cities with low average wages. On the other, low average level of wages favours presidential candidates affiliated with the post-communist party. Moreover, there is suggestive evidence that incumbency status interacts with affiliation with the post-communist party. The results tend to be robust with respect to different model specifications, including those accounting for unobserved heterogeneity. Adapted from the source document.
The analysis of vertical price relationship along the supply chain from producers to consumers has become a popular tool of evaluating the efficiency and degree of competition in agrifood systems ...over recent decades. There is a wealth of literature on the farm-retail price spread for different commodities and countries. However, with one exception (Bojnec, 2002) none have studied price transmission and marketing margins in the transition economies. It is a common belief that because of the distorted markets inherited from the pre 1989 period, the deficiency of the price-discovery mechanisms, and unpredictable policy interventions, marketing margins are generally larger in the transition economies than in competitive markets. Using cointegration analysis, we find that producer and retail pork meat prices are cointegrated, the retail prices entering the cointegration space as weakly exogenous variables. Structural tests imposing homogeneity conditions are carried out and show a competitive pricing strategy. Price transmission modeling suggests that, despite the common belief, price transmission on the Hungarian pork meat market is symmetric.
