Zoltán Bakucs

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.

Socio-Economic Status and the Structural Change of Dietary Intake in Hungary

Abstract Typically, big changes in the economic system lead to alterations on families’ disposable income and thus on their spending for different types of products, including food. These may imply in the long run a structural modification of the population’s diet quality. After the fall of the socialist system, in the past two decades, Central and Eastern European countries, including Hungary, went through a profound and sometimes difficult transition of their political and economic systems, shifting from a centralized plan to an open-market economy, and, perhaps more importantly, the European Union integration. Economic change in lower-income and transitional economies of the world appears to coincide with increasing rapid social change. With respect to nutrition, there is evidence that these countries are changing their diets and that changes seem to happen at a faster pace than ever before (e.g. Ivanova et al., 2006). In this paper, we analyse the evolution of Hungarian dietary patterns based on socio-economic status (SES) data between 1993 and 2007. Data allows defining and profiling several clusters based on aggregated consumption data, and then inspecting the influence of SES variables using OLS and multinomial logit estimations

Innovation and output in OECD countries: implications upon emerging economies

The paper analyses the long run relationship between research and development expenditure and GDP in the OECD and emerging countries between 1991 and 2000 using panel cointegration methods. Our results suggest the long-run causality running from research and development investment towards GDP. Estimated elasticities show the increased importance of R&D investment, 1% increase in innovation investments generates on average a 0.58% increase of the output. In addition, we show that unit research and development investment increase generates higher returns in emerging than in developed economies.