Yann Desjeux

New Challenges in Agricultural Advisory Services from a Research Perspective: A Literature Review, Synthesis and Research Agenda

Abstract Purpose: Agricultural advisory services are perceived by many actors involved in rural development as a key driver behind innovation processes in agriculture. However, changes in national and global contexts cause dramatic changes in the orientation of advisory services, their organisation and their methods of intervention. This article aims to analyse the major research topics related to agricultural advice. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on an extensive review of literature produced over a ten-year period that is accessible through the CAB, ECONLIT and Web of Science citation indexes. Using keywords related to extension and advisory services, we selected published articles according to the relevance of the results provided in relation to advisory services and the quality of the discussion on past or current controversies. Findings: The results show that the ongoing scientific debates are shaped by the diversity of disciplines, methods, topics and schools of thought. The scientific community largely has focussed on five main themes: (1) the institutional environment of agricultural advisory services; (2) the structures necessary for the operation of an advisory system; (3) the actors providing advisory services and the skills deployed in advisory activities; (4) the approaches, methods, tools and content of advisory activities; and (5) the assessment and impacts of advisory systems. Practical implications: This literature review is useful for researchers and practitioners to better understand research results in the field of advisory services. It paves the way for future research. Originality/Value: Although many articles have been written in recent decades on agricultural advisory services, few studies provide an overview of the contributions of, and debates in, the international scientific community.

Subsidies and Technical Efficiency in Agriculture: Evidence from European Dairy Farms

Abstract The objective of this article is to examine the association between agricultural subsidies and dairy farm technical efficiency in the European Union, and in so doing we make novel contributions to the literature. We include in the analysis nine diverse western European Union (EU) countries over an 18‐year period (1990‐2007) encompassing the various Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms enacted since the inception of the EU. Further, we account for input endogeneity using an original method of moments estimator. Our results show that the effect of subsidies on technical efficiency may be positive, null, or negative, depending on the country. The analysis reveals that the introduction of decoupling with the 2003 CAP reform weakens the effect that subsidies have on technical efficiency.

Technical Efficiency and Determinants of Mobility Patterns in European Agriculture

European agriculture has undergone considerable structural changes in the last two decades, with a decreasing number of farms and increasing farm size. One important question is whether these changes have been translated into improvements in technical efficiency. The paper provides a comparative analysis of farm technical efficiency in eight EU member states. More specifically, the authors focus on the relative performance fluctuation over time – namely, whether poorly performing farms always remain inefficient whilst some farms are always efficient. The most striking results are as follows. First, there is a remarkable robustness of farm efficiency stability across countries: on average, 60% of farms maintain their efficiency ranking in two consecutive years, while 20% improve and 20% worsen their positions. Second, there is a clear difference between the mobility indicators with respect to farm technical efficiency ranking between the EU15 and the new member states (NMS) included in the study. Due to unstable economic conditions, farms in NMS are more mobile than those in the EU15. Finally, using second-stage regression of mobility scores on a set of farm-specific explanatory variables, some explanations of the mobility patterns are offered.

Productivity, technical efficiency and technological change in French agriculture during 2002-2015: a Färe-Primont index decomposition using group frontiers and meta-frontier

ABSTRACT The objective of the article is to assess productivity change in French agriculture during 2002–2015; namely, total factor productivity (TFP) change and its components – technological change and efficiency change. For this, we use the Färe-Primont index which verifies the multiplicatively completeness property and is also transitive, allowing for multi-temporal and -lateral comparisons. We investigate the extent of heterogeneity within each type of farming sub-sample in terms of TFP change, with the help of the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI). In addition, to compare the technologies among the five types of farming considered, we extend our analysis to the meta-frontier framework. Results indicate that during 2002–2015, all farms experienced TFP progress. The smallest average increase was experienced by the dairy farms and the largest by the field crop farms and the beef farms. The latter had the strongest technological progress but a deterioration in efficiency, while the opposite was found for field crop farms. The analysis of HHI reveals that sheep or goat farms are the most homogenous in terms of the direction of TFP change experienced over the period 2002–2015. The meta-frontier analysis shows that field crop farms’ technology is the most productive of all the types of farming.