Estimation of Determinants of Farmland Abandonment and Its Data Problems

Shinichi Kitano

doi:10.3390/land10060596

Abstract

Abandoned farmland is particularly problematic in developed countries where agriculture has a comparative disadvantage in terms of effective use of land resources invested over time. While many studies have estimated the causes of these problems, few have discussed in detail the impact of data characteristics and accuracy on the estimation results. In this study, issues related to the underlying data and the estimation of the determinants of farmland abandonment were examined. Most previous studies on farmland abandonment in Japan have used census data as the basis of their analyses. However, census data are recorded subjectively by farmers. To address this, surveys of abandoned farmland are being conducted by a third party, and the results are compiled into a geographic information system (GIS) database. Two types of datasets (subjective census data and objective GIS data) were examined for their estimation performance. Although the two sets of data are correlated, there are considerable differences between them. Subjective variables are compatible with subjective data, and objective variables are compatible with objective data (meaning that parameters are easily identified). Original data for analysis, such as policy variables, are compatible with objective data. In policy evaluation research, attention should be paid to objective data collection.

Highlights

Many developed countries, such as Japan and those in the European Union (EU), have been experiencing farmland abandonment problems for decades
abandoned farmland rate (AFR)-C as the dependent variable, and the right side shows the results with AFR-G as the dependent variable
There is no difference in the coefficients for AFR-C between the ordinary least squares (OLS)

Summary

Introduction

Many developed countries, such as Japan and those in the European Union (EU), have been experiencing farmland abandonment problems for decades. In Japan, where the farmland abandonment problem is becoming increasingly serious, many researchers have analyzed the determinants of farmland abandonment [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19] They have used data from the census surveys conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) every five years as the basis [20]. These data are based on subjective abandoned areas as declared by farmers. It may contain measurement errors based on subjective judgments and farmers’ social desirability biases [21]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion