The Essays on Competitiveness, Efficiency, and Productivity: Methodological Issues and Applications

Abstract

This PhD thesis consists of six papers that thematically could be divided into two groups. The first group comprises four papers that deal with assessing and explaining performance of agricultural sector in Ukraine and Belarus. The second group comprises two papers that deal with some methodological and conceptual issues generated in the course of preparing the first group of papers.In the first paper "Ukraine: Agricultural Competitiveness" we perform a disaggregated competitiveness analysis for major individual agricultural products in Ukraine. In the second paper "The Determinants of Dairy Farming Competitiveness in Ukraine" we essentially continue the analysis performed in the first paper and focus on the determinants of dairy farming competitiveness in Ukraine. In the third paper "Price Support, Performance and Technical Progress in Ukrainian Dairy Farms: a Spatial Analysis" we perform a spatial analysis of the determinants of performance and technological improvements in Ukrainian dairy farming. A particular attention in the analysis is drawn to the impact of price subsidies and the influence of agglomeration economies on farm-level performance. In the paper "Belarus: Agricultural Productivity and Competitiveness. Impact of State Support and Market Intervention" we look at the performance of Belarusian agriculture by measuring competitiveness of major individual agricultural products as well as we analyse the efficiency and productivity of farms in the sector and the effect of a massive state support to agriculture. In the fifth paper "Measuring and Comparing the Competitiveness of Heterogeneous Production Systems in Agriculture: a Note" we demonstrate the weakness of inferences based on aggregated/average measures of competitiveness (or based on typical/representative farm data). The last paper "Efficiency, Productivity Growth and Competitiveness: a Note" wraps up the thesis by linking the two strands of analysis on economic performance, i.e. competitiveness analysis and efficiency and productivity analysis.