Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 11
Final Conclusions
V
´
tor Jo
˜
o Pereira Domingues Martinho
This handbook is an original contribution to international literature related to
agricultural economics and is a useful publication for farmers, policymakers,
politicians, and researchers. The following will show the main conclusions obtained
from this handbook throughout its several chapters.
The preoccupation with sustainability is at the top of the agenda for many
countries, when discussing agricultural economics within the context of globalized
economies, where the pressures from international organizations, namely the World
Trade Organization, have their given weight. On the other hand, despite the
increase in productivity, for agriculture in the United States of America (and its
associated advantages and disadvantages), this was not sufficient to avoid the
reduction in volume for the farming output within the economy. Consequently,
there are, as expected, some environmental problems in agriculture, due to the
volumes of methane and nitrous oxide emissions produced by this sector. However,
the reduction in volumes of fossil fuel energy consumption reveals concern for the
environment and sustainability in this country.
In the context of the European Union the values of some agricultural economic
indicators and the results obtained show the importance of some countries, such as
France, and the relevance of some variables in the explanation of the agricultural
output, such as employment. On the other hand, the spatial autocorrelation must be
taken into account in the design of new agricultural policies.
The economic reality, across the different 27 former European Union countries,
is strongly diverse. Another finding is that the manufacturing sector, namely that
based on agriculture and fishery, is not sufficiently developed in order to exploit
opportunities that come from the spillover effects, externalities, endogeneity of the
factors, and learning by doing effects.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search