Cereals Market in Romania under the Impact of the Common Agricultural Policy
The aim of this paper is to analyses the cereals market after Romania accession to European Union. Thus, I considered necessary and appropriate to achieve the dynamic analysis of production, prices, trade, consumption, and self-sufficiency that provides an overview on the evolution of the cereals market in Romania, in the European context, starting from resources representing the demand, to the uses that represent the supply. I also point out the main mechanisms and support instruments for the cereals market under the Common Agriculture Policy, in the period 2007-2013 and towards 2014-2020.
Romanian position in the light of the future common agricultural policy reform.
We witness today important debates in the designation of future agricultural polices that will greatly affect the European agri-food and rural development sector. Based upon different approaches created after 2007, the paper proposes three scenarios that should be further empirically investigated at the Romanian farm level in order to establish the Romanian position in the future reforms. They are: a status quo scenario in which the CAP reforms continue in the direction set by the Commission in the CAP Health Check; a moderate reform in which the main actual CAP instruments remain but, the budgetary costs decrease and the second pillar is reinforced and redesigned in order to better respond to new challenges; and, thirdly, drastic changes for grated payments, only by means of the second CAP pillar. Finding the best agricultural policies for Romania will insure its adhesion to different Member State groups already formed in the negociations (as determinated by the paper). Further farm research efforts should be conducted in order to realize an ex ante impact evaluation of these scenarios by the use of mathematical programming models.
Product innovation and exports: Evidence from Spanish manufacturing
Firm decisions affect performance and survival. Unfortunately, due to severe selection problems it is hard to study this causality. Export decisions, however, have been related to better performing firms, where causality seems to run from good performance to entering export markets. Using the fact that we observe both exporting and non-exporting firms we analyze the effect of innovation on the decision of firms to export. We find for a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1990-1999 that product innovation is a very important driver of exports for small non-exporting firms. Our results suggest that product innovation rather than process innovation affects firm productivity, which in turn induces firms to select into the export market.