Publications > Cahiers (English)> N° 53, 4th term 1999

• Agricultural productivity growth and convergence among countries,
  L. GUTIERREZ
• Les entreprises peu intensives en R&D peuvent-elles bénéficier des externalités de la recherche publique ? Implications pour les politiques de soutien à l’innovation,
  V. MANGEMATIN, N. MANDRAN
  [Do firms benefit from public R&D externalities ? Implication for innovation policies]
• Modelling the CAP arable crop regime in Italy : degree of decoupling and impact of
  Agenda 2000, D. MORO, P. SCKOKAI texte au format PDF
• Prévisions à court terme du niveau des aquifères : le cas de la nappe de Beauce,
  L. BONNAL, P. FAVARD texte au format PDF
  [Groundwater level short-term forecasts : the case of the Beauce water table]

COMPTES RENDUS DE LECTURE

D. BARTHÉLEMY et J. DAVID (Eds), L’agriculture européenne et les droits à produire, par
A. J. Hollander ; B. BALANYA, A. DOHERTY, O. HOEDEMAN, A. MA’ANIT et E. WESSELIUS, Europe Inc. Liaisons dangereuses entre institutions et milieux d’affaires européens, par
J. Bourdieu

Agricultural productivity growth and convergence among countries

Luciano GUTIERREZ* (* University of Sassari, Department of Agricultural Economics, Via E. De Nicola 1, Sassari 07100, Italy. e-mail : lgutierr@ssmain.uniss.it)

In : Cahiers d'Economie et Sociologie Rurales, n° 53, 1999, pp 5-25

Summary – Agriculture productivity varies dramatically in different regions of world. New intellectual interest has been shown and new efforts have been made to analyse the sources of agricultural growth in recent years. The article considers three questions. First, has labour productivity in the agricultural sector been converging in the last twenty years ? Second, which factors influence growth in the agricultural sectors ? Third, have member countries of regional trade agreements benefited from spillover or agglomeration effects by growing faster ? We find evidence of conditional convergence for a broad sample of countries, but the convergence rate is very low. Other things being equal, countries with higher amounts of technical inputs and more educated people grow faster. There is evidence that the European Union has stimulated productivity.

Key-words : agriculture, growth, labour productivity, convergence.

Les entreprises peu intensives en R&D peuvent-elles bénéficier des externalités de la recherche publique ? Implications pour les politiques de soutien à l’innovation
[Do firms benefit from public R&D externalities ? Implication for innovation policies]

Vincent MANGEMATIN*, Nadine MANDRAN*  (* INRA-SERD, Université Pierre Mendès-France, BP 47X, 38040 Grenoble cedex 9. e-mail : vincent@grenoble.inra.fr ; mandran@grenoble.inra.fre)

In : Cahiers d'Economie et Sociologie Rurales, n° 53, 1999, pp 27-48

Summary — Public policy encourages R&D rather than innovation, especially through tools like tax credit or research programmes. These tools seem well designed for science based sectors. However, in non intensive R&D sector like agro-food sector, knowledge and R&D are distributed among different public and private organisations. The number of firms which have formal and permanent R&D structures is very low. Do agro-food SMEs benefit from R&D externalities to innovate even if they do not perform internal R&D ? The aim of this paper is to evaluate to what extend SMEs which do not perform R&D can benefit from public R&D externalities. A better understanding of innovation mechanisms allows us to better design economic tools to encourage innovation. The paper shows that Spillovers from public research do exist even if absorptive capacity of the firm is low.

Key-words : non-intensive R&D, spillovers, agro-food industry, SME, innovation.

Modelling the CAP arable crop regime in Italy : degree of decoupling and impact of
Agenda 2000

Daniele MORO*, Paolo SCKOKAI* (* Istituto di Economia Agro-alimentare, Università Cattolica, Via Emilia Parmense, 84, 29100 Piacenza, Italy. e-mail : psckokai@pc.unicatt.it ; dmoro@pc.unicatt.it)

In : Cahiers d'Economie et Sociologie Rurales, n° 53, 1999, pp 49-73

Summary – In this paper, we model the CAP arable crop regime using a dual approach that allows us to measure in terms of elasticities the response of production and land allocation decisions to the compensatory payments scheme. We apply this methodology to a data sample of crop farms in the North of Italy, within the transition period of the CAP reform. The estimated model allows us to measure, for the area considered, supply and land allocation responses to the recent “Agenda 2000” reform package, as well as to analyse its degree of decoupling.

Key-words : decoupling, CAP, profit function, Agenda 2000, Italy.

Prévisions à court terme du niveau des aquifères : le cas de la nappe de Beauce
[Groundwater level short-term forecasts : the case of the Beauce water table]

Liliane BONNAL*, Pascal FAVARD**  (* Université Toulouse I, GREMAQ et LEERNA, 21 allée de Brienne, 31000 Toulouse. e-mai l: bonnal@cict.fr ; ** Université de La Rochelle, MSHS, 1, parvis Fernand Braudel, 17042 La Rochelle cedex. e-mail : pascal.favard@univ-lr.fr)

In : Cahiers d'Economie et Sociologie Rurales, n° 53, 1999, pp 75-91

Summary – The objective of this article is to establish short term forecasts (one year), on the level of groundwater using conventional time series models. The interest of this work is to give policy makers reliable information on the evolution of groundwater levels. The forecasts which are essentially based on previous levels of ground-water are quite satisfactory. Indeed, the maximum forecast error is about half percent.

Key-words : groundwater, sustainable, management of an aquifer, groundwater level forecast, time series.