Marek Furmankiewicz (p), Krzysztof Janc, Szymon Szewrański

André Luis S Chagas

Europan Union support programmes have given rise to community-based partnerships, especially in rural areas, referred to as Local Action Groups (LAGs), in which the local stakeholders involved formulate Local Development Strategies (LDS), the implementation of which is subsequently made possible through the financial support of EU funds. Top-down support for specific bottom-up activities is often referred to as neo-endogenous development, and the adoption of pan-European organizational forms and goals as a process of Europeanization.This paper illustrates an attempt to assess the extent to which LDS were consistent with the EU's "Europe 2020" strategy, using the example of LAGs from Poland. Text mining and content analysis are two methods employed herein.The dominant issues for rural areas, that are correspondent to the Europe 2020 strategy, revolve around increasing employment, educating local communities and combating poverty through the use of social inclusion methods, with much less attention dedicated to the issues of greenhouse gas emission reduction and renewable energy development. The strategies in question emphasise innovation with regard to planned activities, insofar as it is perceived at the local level, which usually bears no relation to methodical research and development (R&D) work. The regional differentiation of the LDS objectives indicates a high impact of the European funds' tergets on the undertaken actions. This research was financed by the by Polish National Science Centre, Krakow; Project No 2019/33/B/HS4/00176 (OPUS 17) “The concept of absorptive and transformational Europeanisation of sub-national entities on an example of the Local Action Groups in Poland” (2020–2023).

Luzia Aparecida Antunes, Ítalo João Bolqui Dutra, Humberto Francisco Silva Spolador (p)

Marek Furmankiewicz

Family farming has played a pivotal role in the Brazilian agricultural sector for several decades. In recent years, there has been a structural reorganization of the Brazilian agricultural sector characterized by a decline in the role of family-farms and the emergence of large corporate non-family owned farms. These changes have also been marked by a productivity dispersion as resources have been reallocated away from small family-farms towards these large corporate entities not only raising the level of aggregate productivity among these large firms but also leading to a structural reorganization. Using a panel of Brazilian agricultural census data for the years 2006 and 2017 at a micro regional level, this study proposes to analyze the production technologies of small family-owned farms through a stochastic frontier model and to subsequently decompose a total factor productivity (TFP) index into various components that measure technological change, technical efficiency change, scale-and-mix efficiency change and environmental change. This will improve our understanding of the structural changes taking place across small family-owned, and the results can be used by decision-makers and other stakeholders to design policies that help improve the viability of the Brazilian agricultural sector.

Juan Antonio Jimber Del Rio (p), Paul Lewis, Arnaldo Vergara Romero

Humberto Francisco Silva Spolador

Empirical studies analyze how different factors affect economic resilience in a community, including the three main factors that determine its duration, depth and recovery. Small towns need to be related to major cities to better understand the economic forces at play. Pender et al. consider that growth and economic stability depend on the wealth of communities, emphasizing the importance of physical, financial capital. Political capital determines the distribution and access to resources and the ways in which they are used, natural capital determines the quality of a region, cultural capital determines how people think about the world, and finance capital determines wealth within a community. Intellectual capital is separate from individuals and contributes to well-being in many ways, providing economic resilience in adverse circumstances.
Previous studies on economic resilience include efforts to explore and model resilience with indicators such as judicial independence, impartiality of courts, and education and health levels. Resilience is a function of underlying community capital wealth and its distribution, including the selection of control variables to estimate the value of each capital. In our paper we hypothesized that resilience is a function of underlying community capital wealth (financial, physical, human, social, political, cultural, and natural) and distribution.
MIC-MIC is a proven methodology for a global problem such as resilience in the vast rural areas of the United States. Studies estimated several models using a long list of possible stock variables to estimate each community capital, selecting 24 variables for their significance and alignment with the existing literature. The data used is at the county level within the period 2007-2009, and data from 2005 was used because it was the last figure before the recession.
The main innovation of our study is the application of a proven MIC-MIC methodology to a global problem, such as resilience in the extensive rural areas of the United States, 3108 countys, in which the input variables in the model are each of the variables that make up community capital (financial, political, social, cultural, natural, constructed and humane) and the output variables are recovery, duration, and depth of the crisis, which make up resilience.

Jose Luiz Parré, André Luis S Chagas (p), Mary Paula Arends-Kuenning

Juan Antonio Jimber Del Rio

Brazilian agriculture is characterized by the prevalence of small farms and by regions with a high degree of rurality and dominance of the agricultural sector in the economy. These two characteristics affect the diversity of agricultural production in the country. Specifically, the article aims to analyze the effects of farm size and farmland use on agricultural diversification for 4,298 Brazilian municipalities from 1996 to 2017 (the last three agricultural censuses). The level of diversification was determined using three different agricultural diversification indices (Simpson, Shannon, and Effective Number). Empirically, we consider spillover effects by estimating spatial models at the municipal level using panel data, highlighting the importance of location and neighborhood. The study’s findings indicate a tendency towards local concentration of agricultural production in the country, despite the balance between municipalities with diversified and concentrated production. The results showed a significant effect of small farms and the municipalities' rurality degree on the agricultural output diversification. The study provides insights into the discussion on measures to strengthen support for small properties and regions that diversify crops to ensure economic efficiency and food security.