The role of CAP subsidies in reducing socio-economic marginalisation in Romanian rural areas
Keywords:
cluster, Data Envelopment Analysis, diversification, multifunctionality, rural villages, second pillarAbstract
Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the rural areas of Romania have suffered from intense permanent out-emigration. Following its entry and in an effort to counter this phenomenon, the European Union has tried, through financial subsidies and decoupled payments, to lessen the socio-economic marginalisation in rural territories. The core purpose of this paper was to assess, using a quantitative methodology, whether these financial subsidies and other kinds of support disbursed through the Common Agricultural Policy have had a discernible effect in reducing the levels of poverty and permanent emigration in the regions of Romania. To this end, this research has employed two methods: Principal Component Analysis aimed at defining some clusters among the Romanian regions, and Data Envelopment Analysis, to conduct an efficiency analysis of farming activities. The prime aim of this latter methodology was to identify which socio-economic variables have been involved in the permanent emigration over the period 2007-2017 in order to be able to address those factors and so reduce the levels of socioeconomic pauperisation present in Romanian rural areas. Findings have revealed that, generally speaking, the financial support and decoupled payments allocated through the European Union have had a positive and significant impact, generating many employment opportunities and greater diversification in the Romanian countryside, which in turn has had a direct impact on reducing the levels of poverty and, thus, the levels of permanent emigration in some Romanian regions.
References
Ambrosini, J. W., Mayr, K., Peri, G. & Radu, D. (2012). The selection of migrants and returnees in Romania: Evidence and long-run implications. IZA Discussion Paper, No. 6664.
Andrén, D. & Roman, M. (2016). Should I stay or should I go? Romanian migrants during transition and enlargements. In: Labor migration, EU enlargement, and the Great recession, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 247-269.
Anghel, R. G. (2016). Migration in differentiated localities: changing statuses and ethnic relations in a multi-ethnic locality in Transylvania, Romania. Population, Space and Place, 22(4), 356-366.
Banker, R. D., Charnes A. & Cooper, W. W. (1984). Some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis. Management Science 30(9), 1078-1092.
Battese, G. E. & Coelli, T. J. (1992). Frontier production functions, technical efficiency and panel data: with application to paddy farmers in India. Journal of Productivity Analysis, 3(1-2), 153-169.
Bolasco, S. (2002). Analisi multidimensionale dei dati. Roma, Carocci. Charnes, A., Cooper, W. W. & Rhodes, E. (1978). Measuring the efficiency of decision making units. European Journal of Operational Research, 2, 429-444.
Coelli, T. J., Rao, D. S. P., O’Donnell, C. J. & Battese, G. E. (2005). An introduction to efficiency and productivity analysis, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 349.
Coelli, T. J., Van Lierde, D. & Perelman, S. (2008). CAP reforms and total factor productivity growth: An analysis of Belgian farm-level data. Mimeo. Proceedings in the 26th Conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE) held from 12th-18th August 2006 at Gold Coast, Australia.
Dachin, A. (2008). Rural development – a basic condition for narrowing regional disparities in Romania. Romanian Journal of Regional Science, 2(2), 106-117.
Davidova, S. (2011). Semi-subsistence farming: An elusive concept posing thorny policy questions. Journal of Agricultural Economics, 62(3), 503-524.
Davidova, S. & Bailey, A. (2014). Roles of small and semi-subsistence farms in the EU. EuroChoices, 13(1), 10-14.
Davidova, S., Fredriksson, L. & Bailey, A. (2009). Subsistence and semi-subsistence farming in selected EU new member states. Agricultural Economics, 40(1), 733-744.
Davis, J. & Pearce, D. (2001). The non-agricultural rural sector in Central and Eastern Europe. World Bank Technical Paper, 111-130.
Di Franco, G. (2005). EDS: Esplorare, descrivere e sintetizzare i dati. Milano: Francoangeli.
Färe, R. & Primont, D. (1995). Multi-output production and duality: Theory and applications. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston.
Färe, R., Grosskopf, S., Norris, M. & Zhang, Z. (1994). Productivity growth, technical progress, and efficiency change in industrialised countries. The American Economic Review, 84(1), 66-83.
Galluzzo, N. (2013). Farm dimension and efficiency in Italian agriculture: a quantitative approach. American Journal of Rural Development, 1(2), 26-32.
Galluzzo, N. (2015). Technical and economic efficiency analysis on Italian smallholder family farms using Farm Accountancy Data Network dataset. Studies in Agricultural Economics, 117(1), 35-42.
Galluzzo, N. (2018). Impact of the Common Agricultural Policy payments towards Romanian farms. Bulgarian Journal Agricultural Science, 24(2), 199-205.
Giurca, D. (2008). Semi-subsistence farming – prospects for the small Romanian farmer to choose between a “way of living” or efficiency. Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, 5(3-4), 215-230.
Haggblade, S., Hazell, P. & Reardon, T. (2010). The rural non-farm economy: Prospects for growth and poverty reduction. World Development, 38(10), 1429-1441.
Horváth, I. & Anghel, R. G. (2009). Migration and its consequences for Romania. Südosteuropa, 57(4), 386.
Horváth, I. & Kiss, T. (2015). Depopulating semi-periphery? Longer term dynamics of migration and socioeconomic development in Romania. Demográfia English Edition, 58(5).
Ianos, I. (1998). The influence of economic and regional policies on migration in Romania. Romania: Migration, Socio-economic transformation and perspectives of regional development, W. Heller (ed.), Sudosteuropa-Studie, 62, 55-76.
Jolliffe, I. T. (1986). Principal component analysis. Springer, New York.
Kulcsár L.J . & Brădăţan, C. (2014). The greying periphery - Ageing and community development in rural Romania and Bulgaria. Europe-Asia Studies, 66(5), 794-810, DOI:10.1080/09668136.2014.886861.
Madau, F. A., Furesi, R. & Pulina, P. (2017). Technical efficiency and total factor productivity changes in European dairy farm sectors. Agricultural and Food Economics, 5(1), 17.
Odeck, J. (2007). Measuring technical efficiency and productivity growth: a comparison of SFA and DEA on Norwegian grain production data. Applied Economics, 39(20), 2617-2630.
Panduru, F., Molnar, M. & Poenaru, M. (2009). Income, inequality, poverty. In: M. Preda (coord) Social risks and inequities in Romania (Venituri, inegalitate, sărăcie. In: M. Preda (coord) Riscuri si inechităţi sociale în Romania.) Bucharest: Polirom (Ro).
Petrick, M. & Tyran, E. (2003). Development perspectives of subsistence farms in South-eastern Poland: Social buffer stock or commercial agriculture. Subsistence Agriculture In Central and Eastern Europe: How to Break The Vicious Circle. Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe IAMO, Halle (De), 106-123.
Petrick, M. & Weingarten, P. (2004). The role of agriculture in Central and Eastern European rural development: engine of change or social buffer? (No. 25). Studies on the agricultural and food sector in Central and Eastern Europe. Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe IAMO, Halle (De),1-443.
Popescu, D. L. (2014). Subsistence/Semi-subsistence agricultural exploitations: Their roles and dynamics within rural economy/ rural sustainable development in Romania. Procedia Economics and Finance, 16, 563-567.
Porumbescu, A. (2015). Defining the new economics of labor migration theory boundaries: a sociological-level analysis of international migration. Revista de Științe Politice. Revue des Sciences Politiques, (45), 55-64.
Sandu, D. (2005a). Dynamics of Romanian emigration after 1989: From a macro-to a micro-level approach. International Journal of Sociology, 35(3), 36-56.
Sandu, D. (2005b). Emerging transnational migration from Romanian villages. Current Sociology, 53(4), 555-582.
Sandu, D. (2007). Community selectivity of temporary emigration from Romania. Romanian Journal of Population Studies, 1–2, 11–45.
Simionescu, M. (2016). Macroeconomic determinants of permanent emigration from Romania: A Bayesian approach. Journal of International Studies, 9(2), 170-180.
Tudor, M. M. (2015). Small scale agriculture as a resilient system in rural Romania. Studies in Agricultural Economics, 117(1), 27-34.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Bulgarian Journal of Agricultural Science
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
