Productivity, Price Volatility, and Dynamic Choices in French Agriculture ; Productivité de l'agriculture française et volatilité des prix

Abstract

The EU has adopted many reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the past decades. Price support has decreased, and decoupled payments have been introduced. As a result, European agricultural prices have become more volatile, in line with world prices.This dissertation measures the evolution of the productivity of French agriculture in a dynamic stochastic farm decision model in the new economic context with increased price volatility. On this basis, it studies the dynamic link between price risk, farmer decisions, and productivity in the structural estimation framework. The literature review in Chapter 2 describes productivity as a residual and emphasizes the measurement issues from the unobserved capital data series and the endogeneity problem in primal estimation.Chapter 3 compares the numerical methods to solve and estimate nonlinear dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) or DSGE-like models, in which capital and productivity are latent state variables. Chapter 4 estimates productivity in a dynamic stochastic decision model based on the generalized maximum entropy (GME) approach. We show that the productivity growth in French agriculture has slowed down and become more volatile following the rise in price volatility. Overall, price risk has an impact on productivity in the way that when exposed to high risks, farmers change their production, consumption, investment and financial borrowing decisions, which in turn affects the realized productivity negatively. Chapter 5 simulates the market impacts of the CAP instruments in a dynamic GTAP-AGR CGE mode ; À la suite des réformes successives de la Politique Agricole Commune (PAC), les soutiens publics par des prix ont diminué au profit de soutiens directs aux revenus agricoles. Cela a exposé les agriculteurs français à une grande volatilité des prix, reconnectés avec les prix mondiaux.Cette thèse mesure l'évolution de la productivité de l'agriculture française dans un modèle dynamique stochastique en intégrant la récente augmentation de la ...