During the period of transformation of Poland's economic system an essential change occurred in the level of economic equilibrium in agriculture. Consequently, the rules of the market economy implemented in the fragmented farming sector sharply revealed all the negative effects of the failure to prepare that sector for competition. The situation led to a dramatic income incapacity of the majority of farms. In addition, a considerable number of farms was eliminated from the market.The data on the incomes of farms in 2004 indicate that the greater part of farms failed to achieve the level of income per head equal to remuneration received by the average full-time worker. A comparison of the relation of agricultural net income expressed as a payment received by a person doing a full-time work on a farm with the average net pay in the national economy in 2004 shows that 16 ESU constituted the limit for farms providing pay for work at parity level. The hopes for an improvement in the economic situation of Polish farmers were and are connected with Poland's integration with the European Union and assistance programmes offered within the Common Agricultural Policy. However, the actual effects of that assistance will largely depend on the ability of the farms to absorb the available means.The data from FADN covering the last few years suggest that the economic condition of farms producing goods for the market which operate in the European Union depends not only on the economic effectiveness of production but also on their ability to absorb means offered them owing to the mechanisms of the Common Agricultural Policy.In the programming and implementation of a rational agricultural policy it is necessary to precisely define the beneficiaries of various assistance programmes and this creates an urgent need to formulate a precise definition of a farm.
The method of determining the economic viability of farms is presented. An ability of a family farms to work out an income that enables to remunerate the labour costs of family members plus 4% of its working assets is adopted as the base for determination of this viability. Apart form determining the economic viability of a farm, the suggested method allows to enrich the classification of farms by making use of a demographic criterion and taking into consideration vocational activity conducted outside a farm. Basing on the assumptions made, the classification of farms forming a sample of the Polish Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) in 2004 was done. The results of these calculations were generalized for 81% of the observation area of the Polish FADN which covers 745023 farms.
Based on farm panel data the authors empirically investigate the determinants of Polish farm households' flexibility from 1994 to 2001. They focus on scale flexibility (adjustment in production volume) and scope flexibility (adjustment in product mix). The findings of our fixed-effects regression provide evidence that smaller farms are more flexible, both with regard to scale and scope of production. Farms with a higher share of variable costs tend to be more flexible, while producers who specialized in capital-intensive technologies turned out to be less flexible. Some results differ significantly from the prevailing expectations, in particular we found that farms where a generational succession took place displayed less flexibility over time. Moreover, access to off-farm income and finances (income of household members, loans, government subsidies) is significant, but its influence varies. The results suggests that Polish farmers use various strategies in order to adjust the farm to changing environment, which should be taken into account in the design of supporting policies.
This paper deals with the estimation of a random coefficient model. The virtue of this approach is that it considers farm heterogeneity, which conventional SFA models do not. When the model is applied to Polish farms, the results indicate that the conventional random and fixed effect models overestimate the inefficiency score. In addition, the reasons for inefficiency are analyzed. It is shown that despite the fragmentation of the Polish agriculture, there is no evidence for scale inefficiency. Moreover, inefficiency could partly be attributed to factors, which affect the management input and requirements on farms.
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