Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
For these three countries, the effect of slight changes in land intensity
result in a decrease of the energy intensity. The trend effect results in an
increase in energy intensity, except for Spain, Denmark and Ireland.
Variable input price and capital effects are in general of lesser importance.
Dissimilarities can be observed for energy-based inputs, too. There
are very large increases in energy-based intensity due to labour in Ireland
and the United Kingdom, and smaller increases in France and Spain. On
the contrary, the effect is decreasing for Sweden and Portugal. Land and
trend effects also show a variety of patterns. It is worth noting that the
'clusters' identified in the descriptive evolution of energy and energy-
based inputs do not hold in the detailed analysis of the separate effects.
The explanation of the variety of results found at the national level
probably lies in factors that go beyond the scope of this chapter. It is
recognised that the countries in the sample have evolved in quite diverse
ways, that their agriculture differs in levels of modernisation and that
environmental problems and concerns are not the same. This is also related
to the fact that these countries have different structural characteristics, and
dealing with energy and environmental issues requires a separate analysis
of each country.
Despite the observation of such varied patterns of evolution, it is
worth considering the evolution of energy intensity for EU agriculture as a
whole, in accordance with to recent trends characterising EU agriculture as
a block. Moreover, a comparison between each country and the aggregate
results sheds light on each country's particular evolution. Thus, the next
step of the analysis is the aggregation of the individual country results in a
series of EU intensities.
All output data, originally reported in current values of local
currencies was first converted into ECUs, using the exchange rates in
SPEL, and then the output share of each country was used as a weight in
aggregating over EU agriculture. Given data limitations, the period of
analysis is 1979-1993. The actual intensities for energy and energy based
inputs are summarised in a pair of series of energy and energy-based EU
intensities, using formula (5.5).
It follows from equation (5.6) that the rate of change in total
intensity has two parts: the composition effect (between) and the intensity
effect (within). The composition effect reflects the change in intensity
resulting from changes in agricultural output from the different countries
(the product of the intensity of country and the corresponding rate of
change in output share, summed across all countries). The intensity effect
represents the expansion or contraction of intensity directly proportional to
the aggregate agricultural activity holding composition constant (the rate of
change in aggregate output).
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