The Efficiency of Public Financial Support Investments into Dairy Farms in Poland by the European Union

Abstract

The main aim of this research was to evaluate the efficiency of the use of public financial support investment activities into selected dairy farms in Poland. The research targeted 207 farms that earned their living through milk production and benefited from the 2011–2014 European Union (EU) financial support for investments carried out under the “modernization of agricultural holdings” included in the Rural Development Programme (RDP 2007–2013). Two research hypotheses were developed for this work. The first research hypothesis, “the possibility of obtaining funding for an investment is a factor that determines its implementation”, was positively verified. This was mainly due to the size of the investments carried out in the research farms, where an average increase in fixed assets was recorded at the level of 90%. The econometric calculations were carried out indirectly from the declarations of the farmers themselves, who, during the research, excluded the possibility of carrying out investments without receiving external support. The second research hypothesis, “investments carried out in farms improved their economic situation”, was positively verified. This was shown with the calculated results of agricultural income in the research farms, which increased in the analyzed period from 66.5%, to 125%.

Farm digital tools: A systematic review of investments and environmental implications

“…The research we reviewed demonstrates that evaluations of DT investment decisions are increasingly accounting for the tools' environmental impacts. More specifically, DTs are seen as having the potential to promote conservation [30,46] and help farmers adapt to climate change [36].…”

“…After becoming a member of the European Union, Poland implemented various measures to encourage and enhance farm investments. Consequently, a number of studies have examined how public sources of financial support and easier access to credit have affected farm investments [44][45][46].…”

“…More recently, they have begun to purchase advanced DTs to improve farm performance and competitiveness. These DTs include precision agriculture devices [73], the Internet of Things (IoT) [106], automated systems [107], Industry 4.0 technologies [42], information and communication technologies (ICTs) [108], and robotic milking systems [46,109].…”

Spatial-Temporal Evolution and Influencing Factors of Rural Financial Resource Allocation Efficiency in China

“…The aim of rural financial resources allocation is to promote the development of economy and society (Gutierrez-Nieto et al, 2009;Xu et al, 2021;Zalewski et al, 2022), thus the output of rural financial resources allocation is reflected in three aspects: rural economic development (per capita agricultural GDP), social development (urbanization rate) and farmers' life quality (farmers' income and Engel's coefficient).…”

“…The allocation of capital resources includes credit resources (Hu et al, 2021) and fiscal resources (Long et al, 2016). In terms of financial institution resources, prior studies have used Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to calculate the efficiency of rural financial institutions (Fletschner et al, 2010;Duguma & Han, 2021) Existing studies show that DEA is broadly used to evaluate the financial efficiency of rural banks (Xiang et al, 2018), agricultural cooperatives (Gutierrez-Nieto et al, 2009), and microfinance institutions (Xiang et al, 2018;Zalewski et al, 2022). The efficiency of regional rural banks in India reveals wide variations in efficiency across the states in each period, there is a significant improvement in technical efficiency resulting through the gain in both pure efficiency as well as scale efficiency (Xu et al, 2021).…”