Towards measuring political rents in agriculture: case studies of different agrarian structures in the EU

Abstract

It is generally believed that the subsidisation of agriculture serves as a payment of political rents to farmers. Here, we attempt to show that characterisation of the entire amount of subsidies as “political rent” is unjustified in the light of the definition of political rent as formulated in the rent-seeking theory. Political rents in agriculture diverge from the definition, since the resources devoted to rent-seeking partly serve to produce public goods – that part cannot be regarded as wastage. Furthermore, if market imperfections cause rents to be captured by other entities (the treadmill theory), then it is even more true that these benefits are not exclusive. However, it is hard to find any attempts to measure the value of political rents. Thus, a novel methodology is proposed for valuing these items, with the aim of calculating the “pure political rent”, based on an input-output (I-O) Leontief approach adopting matrices for “representative farms” according to EUFADN typology and on a decomposition of the Hicks-Moorsteen TFP index for the period 2007–2012 for four countries: Slovakia, France, Austria and Poland.