bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Les difficultés financières des agriculteurs européens
Authors: Blogowski Alain , Colson François , Léon Yves 
Published: March 2022

Financial difficulties faced by European farmers.
The policy of rapid modernization of a large fringe of European agriculture has led to an unprecedented development of farm production and labour productivity. Nonetbeless, over the last décade a large number of f armers hâve found themselves in financial difficulties. This no longer only concerns f armers in precarious situations la- boriously subsisting on small unit s of production. At the same time as such small unit s are disappearing, young f armers on medium-sized and large farms, who hâve often be- nefited from modernization subsidies, are also running into trouble. This phenomenon became, during the eighties, a problem of agricultural policy for several countries in Northern Europe.
In order to evaluate, among the low-income f armers, how many hâve extrême financial difficulties, an examination of individual situations becomes necessary. Based on the si- multaneous analysis of a ratio of financial autonomy and a mesasurement of income or self-financing, this examination shows that financial fragility is no longer a marginal phenomenon and that the farmers in question are often very well-equipped. The crisis has hit Denmark particularly badly since more than half the farms hâve had financial difficulties. In comparison with Denmark, the problems in other countries seem less acute. Thus, in Ireland, the proportion of farmers in difficulty was never more than 9 % even tvhen the crisis bit deepest (1980).
In more récent years (1986-1988), the proportion has varied between 14% and 29 % in the countries under study : France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In order to help their farmers in difficulty, most states hâve had to intervene on either a short or longer term basis. Assistance usually takes the form of the goverment covering part of the interest payments on the loans contracted by the farmers, or, more rarely, a guarantee by the public authorities on the banking loans. Assessment of the effectiveness of such assistance, carried ont in some of the countries involved, shows that greater financial viability is always a resuit of improved performance of the farms. Public aid has a bénéficiai effect when it atténuâtes excessive financial charges but is inappropriate when it holds up the restructuring of unproductive farms. In light of thèse findings, the policies of systematic économie assistance to debt-ridden farms hâve everywhere been cal- led into question. Only sélective aid for farms faced with adaptation difficulties seem to be worth maintaining.
S'adapter à la demande alimentaire : nouvelles orientations industrielles en matière d'innovation
Authors: Wilkinson John 
Published: March 2022

L'analyse des biotechnologies agro-alimentaires mises en œuvre dans la production industrielle fait apparaître deux grandes caractéristiques : l'extrême hétérogénéité des structures productives qui les adoptent, d'une part, le caractère transverse ou générique des biotechnologies, de l'autre.
Une enquête réalisée auprès de vingt-six grandes sociétés confirment que les applications industrielles des biotechnologies supposent le développement de nouvelles formes d'intégration et de coopération au sein du complexe agro-alimentaire. Ces nouvelles organisations devront tenir compte, cependant, des nouvelles exigences des consommateurs en matière de sécurité et de qualité alimentaires.
Stratégies de planification et d'ordonnancement. Quel modèle pour l'industrie des produits frais laitiers ?
Authors: Nakhla Michel 
Published: March 2022

Scheduling in the food processing industry.
This article analyses the problem of production scheduling in the dairy product industry where variety and sell-by date constraints have to be taken into account. Using the formalization of priorities as a basis, we shall attempt to demonstrate that a thorough understanding of the relation between a formai scheduling model and its implementation permits one to grasp the profound changes in industrial processing Systems at present.
The analysis presented does not daim to represent a generai theory of scheduling in the dairy industry, taking into account ail the industrial aspects, but a departure point for highlighting basis issues which will no doubt prepare future industrial Systems. The formalization of priorities gives a clear indication of the knowledge of those involved in scheduling. In practice these actors strive continually to find a schedule combining the different constraints to devise a programme based on compromise. This "savoir-combiner", or skill in combining, is in fact closely related to the state of productive facilities. Production managers structure the resolution of a priority problem by using a few rules to break it down into several smaller independent problems. This enables them to reduce the number of possible combinations and then to find a schedule in stages. Their calculation takes into account firm orders and stocks, the state of the workshop's resources, the sequence and assignment of products to lines according to the size of orders and in the light of past experience. It is their experience which leads them to consider certain workshop configurations as potentially more efficient than others. This experience also leads them at the start of production to favour highly decentralized scheduling and consequently to simplify combinations which leads, in the end, to a certain succession of batches.
The search for a compromise between multiple objectives based on both previous situations in the workshop and on a decentralization of scheduling seems to favour the development of skills in combining, which closely follow changes in the productive system it self as is shown below. With this analysis new representations of possible changes can be created and the idea of a transformation of work organization based on a new form of production management can be developed.
Other ways of adapting to this new organization of production and simplification of scheduling now exist and concern mainly investment in production capacity. Some industries over-size and specialize their plants to deal with intense efforts during peak periods. They must however also convince the operators and the workers of the necessity of going from normal to flexible hours during the year.
Les incidences des relations franco-britanniques sur le commerce du vin (1689- 1860)
Authors: Nye John Vincent 
Published: March 2022

War and wine : the constrained evolution of the Anglo-French wine trade , 1689-1860.
Prior to the last quarter of the seventeenth century, France was Britain's largest trading partner and accounted for the bulk of Britain's large merchandise trade deficit, mostly through the sale of wine and brandies. War with France, and retaliation for Colbert's mercantilist policies limiting imports of British manufacture led to prohibitions followed by extravagantly high tariffs on French wine and other alcoholic beverages. The long period of prohibition and tariffs between 1689 and 1713 permitted three strong lobbies to emerge in Britain : domestic beer brewers, makers of gin, whiskey and other liquor, and Anglo-Portuguese wine merchants. This led to a deliberate policy of keeping out French products and promotion of local beverages and imports from Portugal and Spain. Indeed, the Portuguese export of wines developed primarily to serve Britain. For the French, this meant the loss of her most lucrative market for over one and a half centuries, a loss only partially alleviated by French development of high-priced, high-quality wines designed to minimize the effects of specific (per volume) tariffs. For France, this meant a substantial loss of income. Preliminary calculations suggest a counterfactual in which I860 French domestic product would have been 20% to 70% higher depending on the underlying assumptions, a loss of much greater magnitude than the calculated gains for Britain from the steam engine. For Britain, this served as the foundation of a tax system that relied heavily on customs duties and domestic excises on alcoholic beverages while developing a national pattern of alcoholic demand centered on beer and gin at the low end and port and fine Bordeaux at the high end. Overall this paper stresses the importance of examining gains (or in this case, losses) from trade in an evolving economic and political context.
Les modèles d'entreprise : application au secteur laitier
Authors: Albert Pierre , Huiban Jean-Pierre , Martin Michel 
Published: March 2022

Models offirm : a tool to study and classify dairy industry.
The study of industrial sectors has always been very present in the economic literature. But several different approaches were used, some concerning especially the sectoral dynamics and others dealing with the study of firm, considered as an organizational entity or as an informational nexus. Works that would try to build a bridge between the différent approaches are rare.
We propose a synthetic représentation of the firm within three dimensions : the technical combination of production factors, the organizational structure, the relations with the market. By this way, an industrial sector can be considered as the aggregation of several groups composed by firms that are close to a stylised form, that we named a "firm model".
We consider the case of the French dairy industry as an empirical field to test this analytical tool. Thus, each firm of this sector is analyzed and classified with the help of this scheme, by using individual statistkal data and some data analysis, classification and analysis of variance methods. Nine «firm models» appear in the dairy industry case. Their characteristics as well as their relative weight in the sector are quite different. We also test their relative performances by using various criteria and point oui the existence of an hierarchy between these models : some are very efficient, while the existence of some others is quite surprising in regard to their relative performances.
By the same time, we reveal that some complementarities exist between the firms of the different models, concerning for instance the functional distribution of jobs, this is suggested explicit or implicit relations between firms : competition is not the only way, and coordination also appears between firms. That last point can be useful to understand the sectoral architecture. A sector is not only a competition space for firms, but also a cooperation one. The existence of some firms as well as their strategics or performances cannot be understood if these kinds of relation between firms are not pointed out.
Recherche publique et dynamique industrielle. Une illustration sur la base d'un modèle évolutionniste appliqué au secteur des semences
Authors: Lemarié Stéphane 
Published: March 2022

L'article fait ressortir trois formes principales d'effets de la recherche publique sur la dynamique industrielle, en montrant à chaque fois que l'analyse doit se référer à un certain contexte.
Lorsque l'innovation est contenue dans un certain paradigme, la recherche publique permet (i) un élargissement des opportunités technologiques sur des domaines où l'appropriation de telles opportunités est difficile ou (ii) une augmentation des incitations à investir en recherche dans certaine structure industrielle où des pouvoirs de marché peuvent être acquis en investissant peu en recherche. Enfin (iii), lors d'une phase de changement de paradigme, la recherche publique facilite la transformation en accélérant l'apprentissage des entreprises. Ce dernier effet concerne aussi bien la formation des anticipations avant l'engagement de l'entreprise sur la nouvelle technologie, que le développement de nouvelles compétences après l'engagement.
Pluriactivité agricole : l'hétérogénéité cachée
Authors: Carneiro Maria José 
Published: March 2022

Pluriactivity in agriculture : hidden heterogeneity
Today the non agricultural activities performed by small farmers are known as "pluriactivity". However, this category describes different phenomena whose meanings vary according to historic and socio-economic contexts and also to several authors. Based on the analysis of the existing literature, the author argues that the notion of "pluriactivity" is full of impressions and so do not contribute to qualify the phenomena it designates. The absence of an heuristic content in this category suggests the construction of new objects no more centered on individual actions but on the conditions for social reproduction of small farmers families. The theoretical discussion is illustrated by the data of a research carried out in a small rural village in the French Alpes.
La demande de viandes et poissons en Espagne : une analyse micro-économique
Authors: Laajimi Abderraouf , Albisu Luis Miguel 
Published: March 2022

The demand for meat and fish in Spain : a microeconomic analysis.
In this paper the evolution of meat and fish consumption in Spain during the last decade is first described. Beef, pork and chicken consumption declined whereas the other processed meat products increased. The Almost Ideal Demand System has been used to analyse the demand structure for these products with pooled household data for the October 1989 - September 1992 period, based on a microdata set from the Spanish Food Consumption Panel that is being used for the first time in empirical studies. Demographic variables have been introduced using the translation method. The likelihood ratio tests substantiate that the AIDS model with demographic variables performs well for estimating the demand relations. Based on a parametric test, separability between meat and fish has been tested. The result has showed that the purchase decision is taken together and therefore they have to be considered in the same system. Results show that demand is responsive to prices, total expenditure and demographic variables. Beef and fish consumption is higher in urban areas compared to rural areas, as a result of better distribution channels. However, lamb and chicken consumption is higher in rural areas, as a response to a more traditional consumption pattern. Calculated elasticities, based on the estimated model with both homogeneity and symmetry imposed, are more sensitive to variations of total expenditure and own prices than cross prices. The demand is inelastic, except for pork meat. Both chicken and processed meat products are revealed as necessity goods. Substitution relationships have been pointed, showing the strong competition between several types of meats. Comparison with other studies has showed the benefit from using disagregated data and demographic effects when estimating demand relations.
L'éducation est-elle rentable dans l'agriculture ? Une approche duale appliquée à la Côte-d'Ivoire
Authors: Gurgand Marc 
Published: March 2022

We show that, under unrestrictive conditions and based on a non-recursive rural household model, the effect of education on both technical efficiency over all crops and allocative efficiency can be measured using a farm profit function estimate. This is applied on cross-section data from Côte d'Ivoire. Farm labor supply of farm household members is first shown to decline with education.
Second, education has no effect on farm efficiency (and sometimes a significantly negative one). This is robust to endogeneity of the education variable and is a reasonable result if general human capital, as produced by schooling, is of little use for farming in a steady environment. This is consistent with the few available works on Sub-saharan Africa.
De l'assimilation des connaissances à la capacité de gestion : les PMI agro-alimentaires de la région Rhône- Alpes
Authors: Mangematin Vincent , Hillebrand Michel 
Published: March 2022

From absorptive capacity to management capacity. Small firms in agri-food sector in Rhône-Alpes.
The survey of innovation in agri-food industry describes a very active sector in which the propensity to innovate is above the average of the whole industry while R&D expenditures as well as R&D employment rate remain very low.
Such a situation seems to be paradoxical enough to justify an in-depth analysis. Are the characteristics of innovation in agri-food industry different ? Are they based on the collective research done by the whole sector (including enterprises, technical institutes, research centres, school of engineers...) rather than on a lonely firm ? Or does it mean that innovation dynamics is different from those acting in science based sectors ?
Our results are based on an in-depth study of 23 innovations cases in agrifood sector. These innovations are performed by small and medium size firms located in Rhône-Alpes. All these innovations benefit from subsidies from a public agency, ANVAR (National Agency for valorisation of research).
We show that : 1 ) agri-food small-size firms have no R&D department or even no R&D staff, they have to manage new ways of organising the R&D : in some enterprises, innovation is completely delegated to other firms (industrial designers, sub-contractors...). Based on an original idea of the firm, the design of the technical tools as well as its realisation are delegated to partners, even if they have a bigger size than the agri-food firm. In some cases, the agri-food company makes the industrial design and dedicates only the realisation to partners. The usual case in science based industry is when the firm and its partners are doing collaborative research and innovation ; 2) geographical localisation is not a criteria for the firm in choosing its partners, even if geographic proximity is correlated with the frequency of meeting during the innovation process ; 3) failures are mostly due to problems of partnership (opportunistic behaviour of the partner, asymmetry of information about its know how...) than to scientific or technical obstacles.
Donner une valeur à la biodiversité
Authors: Gauthier Caroline 
Published: March 2022

On the value of biodiversity.

Biodiversity has become a major global issue. The 1992 Earth summit at Rio recommanded discussions on approaches to safeguard biodiversity and to implement national conservation strategies (CNUED, 1993). Such preservation programs generate benefits but are costly. Planners must be given quantitative elements to appreciate these benefits and costs. Economists are then in front of a classical micro-economic problematic : they have to establish the relation between the level of biodiversity and the social value of the services floivs it generates. Therefore they use a surplus analysis. This paper shoivs why such a valuation exercise is difficult for economists : the available frame for such an analysis in the context of the biodiversity preservation is not sufficient.
This insufficiency results firstly from the complexity of the ressource. The paper shows that there is no unique and precise definition of the biodiversity. The definition of the biologists and the definition of the ecologists differ. The correspondance with the economic good biodiversity is then difficult.
This insufficiency results secondly from the non-familiarity of the individuals with the good to value. Because valuation must take into account the totality of the benefits (use and non-use benefits) that biodiversity preservation may generate, data issued from hypothetical markets have to be used. On these hypothetical markets, people are directly intervieived on the value they give to biodiversity. But the non-familiarity of the individuals ivith the good to value (a program of biodiversity preservation) often implies that the obtained values are biased. Individuals are not accustomed to consider a biodiversity preservation program in their program of utility maximization.
This article proceeds by a revieiv of the existing studies. The most remarquable ones are then developed to illustrate the above aspects.
La consommation d'engrais azotés en France. Une prospective pour 2010
Authors: Taverdet-Popiolek Nathalie 
Published: March 2022

The French nitrogen fertilizer consumption. Prospects for 2010.

The protection of the environment is nowadays a major goal for our society and its importance will probably get highly amplified in the near future. Farmers are pointed at because, through their use of fertilizers, they are responsible for a diffuse pollution of rivers andphreatic sheets. At the same time, these farmers are facing economic difficulties due to the steady decrease of agricultural prices in the European Community. Therefore, they try to reduce production costs by a better management of their intermediate consumptions (mostly fertilizers).
Given this context, ivhat will be in fifteen years the consumption of fertilizers in France ? The aim of this paper is to answer this question by studying several scenarii based on the evolution of the economical, political and technological context. The future Common Agriculture Policy will certainly be the factor that will most affect this evolution. We focus only on nitrogen fertilizers, which are supposed to be the main responsibles for the pollution of phreatic sheets and which use can be rationalized. Hoivever, the methodology used to determine future consumption is easily applicable to other inputs (potassic and phosphoric fertilizers, phytosanitary, seeds, energy...). The goal of this research is tivofold :
* On the one hand, we build a prospective model representing the agricultural sector and the fertilizer industries in order to estimate (by simulations) the fertilizer consumption in 2010. No existant methodology can readily be used. We propose a methodology drawing on Yves Barel's thinking (1971) and on systemic analysis, that implies the interaction of modelling, expertizing and simulations. We apply it to the agriculture sector and to the fertilizer industry but it is applicable to other sectors.
* On the other hand, in addition to punctual results, this research aims at drawing a global prospective design of the French agriculture sector in 2010.
The results of our prospective study show that, by the year 2010, the consumption of nitrogen fertilizers should clearly decrease. Such a decrease is mainly explained by a more rational use of fertilizers by farmers, due to the increased "environmentalists" pressure, ivhose lobby is represented at Bruxelles and in each French administrative region. Relevant technological innovations are spreading and should help farmers improve their fertilizing techniques.