Bazyli Czyżewski

A new paradigm of development as a modern challenge in agriculture

Summary The authors of the paper propose a thesis of a necessary change of an industrial development paradigm of agriculture to a socially sustainable one. They present the mechanism of functioning of the first one proving that by stimulating the growth of production of agricultural raw materials it leads to a decreasing marginal productivity and, as a result, to lower incomes of farmers in the conditions of incomplete internalisation of costs. The pressure on natural environment leads to the deterioration of the natural environment welfare. Therefore, the change of that paradigm to the socially sustainable one is necessary. The effects of that model, which exceed the productive and economic sphere, were presented. They take into account the fact that agriculture is also a supplier of public goods. In that case a new concept of a land rent was included, assuming that the agricultural land independently creates a part of a land utility which is subject to market or institutional valorisation if it is limited to some extent of intensity of agricultural economics. However, there must be a declaration of a social demand for that utility of a public character. That process has already started and it determines the evolutionary change of the paradigm of the agricultural development. Streszczenie Autorzy stawiają tezę koniecznej zmiany industrialnego paradygmatu rozwoju rolnictwa na społecznie zrównoważony. Przedstawiają mechanizm funkcjonowania tego pierwszego udowadniając, iż stymulując wzrost produkcji surowców rolniczych prowadzi do malejącej krańcowej produktywności, a w efekcie do niższych dochodów rolników w warunkach niepełnej internalizacji kosztów. Presja na środowisko naturalne prowadzi do pogorszenia dobrostanu naturalnego środowiska. Potrzebna jest więc zmiana tego paradygmatu na społecznie zrównoważony. Zostały przedstawione efekty tego modelu, wykraczające poza sferę produkcyjno-ekonomiczną. Uwzględniają one rolnictwo także jako dostarczyciela dóbr publicznych. W tym przypadku uwzględniona została nowa koncepcja renty gruntowej zakładająca, iż ziemia rolnicza samoistnie tworzy część użyteczności, które podlegają waloryzacji rynkowej lub instytucjonalnej, o ile ograniczy się do pewnego stopnia intensywność gospodarki rolnej. Musi być jednak zgłoszony społeczny popyt na użyteczności o charakterze publicznym. Proces ten już się zaczął i determinuje ewolucyjną zmianę paradygmatu rozwoju rolnictwa.

Political rents in the European Union’s agriculture

Abstract Occurrence of land rents in modern agriculture of the EU is confirmed by the long-lasting upward trend in agricultural land prices. However, a question arises whether these rents are differential ones, linked with a different productivity of agricultural land, absolute ones in the classical sense, or political rents in the meaning of the public choice theory? The objectives of the article are mainly theoretical. The authors made an attempt at verifying the concept of land rent formulated on the basis of studies carried out in Poland. This time, the scope of research includes a cross-section of all agricultural structures of the EU. According to the above-mentioned concept, the source of a modern land rent is higher expected productivity of capital in agriculture than in its market environment. This phenomenon is often justified by paying political rents within the CAP. Is it really the case? The conducted research answers i.a. the question: in which countries and agricultural structures the possible difference of the abovementioned capital productivity is the biggest and to what extent it results from political rents or other factors? Streszczenie Występowanie rent gruntowych we współczesnym rolnictwie UE potwierdza wieloletni rosnący trend cen ziemi rolniczej. Nasuwa się jednak pytanie, czy są to przede wszystkim renty różniczkowe związane z różną wydajnością gruntów rolnych, czy renty absolutne w klasycznym rozumieniu, czy też renty polityczne w ujęciu teorii wyboru publicznego? Cele artykułu mają przede wszystkim wymiar teoriopoznawczy. Podjęto w nim próbę weryfi kacji koncepcji renty gruntowej, którą sformułowano na podstawie badań przeprowadzonych w Polsce. Tym razem jednak zakres badań obejmuje pełen przekrój struktur agrarnych UE. Według wspomnianej koncepcji źródłem współczesnej renty gruntowej jest wyższa oczekiwana produktywność kapitału w rolnictwie niż w jego otoczeniu rynkowym. Często tłumaczy się to zjawisko wypłacaniem rent politycznych w ramach WPR. Czy tak jest w istocie ? Przeprowadzone badania odpowiadają m.in. na pytanie w jakich krajach i strukturach agrarnych ewentualna różnica wspomnianej produktywności kapitału jest największa i na ile wynika to z rent politycznych, a na ile z innych czynników?

Education Quality and its Drivers in Rural Areas of Poland

Abstract A two-stage study was carried out. Firstly, a pioneering attempt was made to measure the quality of education in rural areas of Poland, by county (powiat), using a synthetic indicator. Secondly, the socioeconomic determinants of that quality were modelled. A strength of this study is the fact that it covers the entire population of the given type of administrative units. The analysis served to verify the hypothesis that exogenic socioeconomic factors are key to the effectiveness of the educational process in rural areas. It was shown that in Poland the theories of polarised development are more applicable than those of endogenic development. There was observed an inversely proportional effect from the centre–periphery axis on education quality, but, above all, the effect of several gravitational systems, in which there occurs exogenic diffusion of the results of economic growth and progress from the present and former provincial capitals.

Rent-seeking in agricultural policy revisited: a new look at the Common Agricultural Policy consensus

It is generally believed that agricultural interventionism represents the payment of political rents to farmers. We attempt to show that the concept of political rent known as the rent-seeking theory is not valid for agricultural policy. It is not justified to identify the entire subsidies paid to agriculture as a ‘political rent’, since political rents cannot be taken to include payments for the supply of public goods or those transfers which compensate for market imperfections. Our work aims firstly to review the concepts of rents and rent-seeking, and to develop a methodology for quantifying political rents in agricultural policy. We perform comparative analyses with the aim of calculating the ‘pure political rent’, based on the input-output approach for representative farms according to the EU FADN typology and on a decomposition of the Hicks–Moorsteen TFP index for the period 2004-2012 and 27 European Union Member States. The calculations of political rents show that historical payments are neither a rational nor a just solution. No attempts have yet been made in the literature to quantify political rents, even though this might lead to an improvement in the effectiveness of public expenditure. The original methodology is proposed for valuing these items.

Impact of different models of agriculture on greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions: A sectoral approach

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.

The effects of use values, amenities and payments for public goods on farmland prices: Evidence from Poland*

The article contributes to the debate on how land prices are affected by production values, by farming subsidies and by environmental amenities. The authors carried out a comprehensive review of the literature on the actual determinants of land value and made an attempt to classify different approaches to this matter. Then they performed an empirical case study of the drivers of agricultural land values in a leading agricultural region of Poland. The aim of the study is to establish how the use values of land, amenities and policy payments contribute to land values in the Single Area Payment Scheme (SAPS), which operates in Poland. The study is based on a sample of 653 transactions during the years 2010–2013. A hierarchical regression (ML-IGLS method) was used, where the unobserved heterogeneity is attributed to the location-specific factors at different levels of analysis. Results indicate that the policy payments for public goods decapitalise the value of land, whereas the environmental amenities have a...

Economic size of farms and adjustments of the total factor productivity to the business cycle in Polish agriculture.

Th e article presents an approach to changes in the total factor productivity (TFP) which diff ers from that generally found in the literature. Changes are calculated in the real terms using the detailed input-output matrices for representative farms in Poland, for diff erent economic size classes, in the years 2007–2013. Input-output matrices were used for the decomposition of the Hicks-Moorsteen TFP index. Th e goal is to evaluate changes in the real TFP in the downturn and recovery phases of the business cycle in agriculture. It was found that the reaction of TFP to business cycle changes on “small”, “medium” and even “large” family farms in Poland is diametrically opposite to that observed in the case of large-scale farms. More than 90% of farms in Poland (except for the largest) increase technical productivity in the conditions of the economic downturn and lower it in the conditions of the economic recovery. Such behaviour is pro-cyclic and irrational, alluding to the 17th-century King’s eff ect, which is vanishing in the agricultural systems of highly developed countries. Th e hypothesis is proposed that the size of the price expectation error which causes that eff ect is negatively correlated with the economic size of the farm, but at the same time it is proportional to the percentage of agricultural income obtained from subsidies and other payments under the SAPS system.

Application of perpetual rent model to valorisation of agricultural land

The concept of creating public goods by land factor is often considered in literature, but its theoretical foundations are quite debatable. The theories of land rent in mainstream economics stand at the position that land factor alone does not create any utility, which means that it does not have any “intrinsic utility”. Only by changing this assumption, it is possible to reconsider a theoretical model for provision of public goods by agriculture. The authors wonder which model of value can be applied to valuate agricultural land so as to make it reflect its intrinsic utility. They propose to adopt the neoclassical Gordon’s model of perpetual rent. The theoretical aim of the article is to interpret the relationships described in this model for the market of agricultural land. The empirical goal is to assess the long-term growth rate of land rent from the Gordon’s model in the 16 regions (voivodeships) of Poland and in the cross-section of different acreages. Paradoxically, it turns out that the neoclassical model is well-fitted to the market of agricultural land in the long term, despite the far-reaching institutional regulation of this market and it provides a basis for quantification of the intrinsic land utility.

Maximizing the quality of education by measuring the educational added value in secondary school technical type on the basis of exam results

Summary The rationale for this study is the search for ways to optimize expenditures on secondary vocational education. Optimization activities should lead to the creation of high quality human capital in the society. The purpose of this study is to verify the view indicating that schools with fewer students achieve higher learning outcomes. Nine classes were selected from a group of all secondary technical schools in Poland (N = 1683). Each class consisted of twenty schools selected by the average annual number of graduates in 2013-2015. A univariate analysis ANOVA was then carried out. The dependent variables were educational added values for matriculation exams in Polish language, the humanities, mathematics and natural sciences. The quality predictor in this study was classes determined by the average number of graduates. The study has led to the conclusion that higher learning outcomes expressed by the average educational added value are achieved in schools with more students. The highest average learning outcomes were achieved in schools with the number of students ranging from 564 to 640. It has also been shown that the average educational added value increases with the number of students in school. It may be supposed that certain numbers of students in school should not be exceeded; however, due to the lack of schools with the number of students far exceeding those in schools covered in this study, it was not possible to determine the maximum number of students in secondary technical schools that would allow them to obtain the expected learning outcomes.

Mechanisms of valuation of public goods on the agricultural land market - considerations in the context of sustainable development

Summary Mechanisms of valuation of public goods on the agricultural land market - considerations in the context of sustainable development Since the beginning of human civilization, the land has been creating certain utilities which satisfy human needs. When the dangerous side effects of industrial agriculture have occurred intrinsic land utilities are being discovered anew. They have a nature of public goods and constitute a hard core of the sustainable agriculture paradigm. Despite irreversible accumulation of capital in the anthropogenic environment many new utilities of the land come into existence without additional capital and labour outlay. Since they are public goods, they are paid from taxes in great measure. This way an intrinsic land utility takes a form of a financial product and can be called „intrinsic productivity” of land. The aim of the elaboration is to identify the mechanism that make intrinsic land utility transforms into productivity in monetary units. A conducted research consists in deriving a land rent capitalized in land prices and estimating its share in land value in comparison with the share of lease fees in the different regions of Poland in years 2000-2009. In the authors’ opinion since accession of Poland to the UE a market valorizes intrinsic utilities of land, whereas the new role of capital and labour is distribution of those utilities for consumers. Streszczenie Mechanizmy wyceny dóbr publicznych na rynku ziemi rolniczej - rozważania w kontekście zrównoważonego rozwoju Od początków cywilizacji człowieka ziemia tworzy samoistnie pewne użyteczności, które zaspokajają jego potrzeby. Od kiedy pojawiły się niebezpieczne efekty uboczne rolnictwa industrialnego ta twórcza rola ziemi jest odkrywana na nowo. Jej użyteczności stają się dobrem publicznym, którego ochrona jest istotą paradygmatu rolnictwa zrównoważonego. Pomimo nieodwracalnej akumulacji kapitału w środowisku antropogenicznym, wiele wspomnianych użyteczności powstaje bez dodatkowych nakładów kapitału i pracy. Jako że są one dobrami publicznymi opłaca się je z podatków. W ten sposób samoistna użyteczność ziemi przybiera formę produktu pieniężnego i może być nazywana „samoistną produktywnością”. Celem opracowania jest identyfi kacja mechanizmu transformacji użyteczności ziemi w produktywność w wymiarze fi nansowym. Przeprowadzone badania zakładały oszacowanie rent gruntowych zdyskontowanych w cenach ziemi rolniczej, a następnie określenie ich relacji do wartości ziemi oraz do czynszu dzierżawnego w przekroju województw w Polsce w latach 2000-2009. W opinii autorów od momentu akcesji Polski do UE rynek waloryzuje w cenach samoistne użyteczności ziemi rolniczej, podczas gdy rolą czynników kapitału i pracy jest ich dystrybucja od rolnictwa do konsumenta.