POLISH AND ROMANIAN DAIRY FARMS USING EU INVESTMENT SUPPORT: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to compare the investment amounts and efficiency of productive input between Polish and Romanian dairy farms depending on whether they access funds under the second pillar of EU’s CAP. The study covered the particularities of farms who access investment funds under the 2nd pillar of EU’s CAP, which allowed to identify the differences between beneficiaries and the control group (i.e. non-beneficiary farms). This paper relies on unpublished 2004–2015 microdata at a farm level, as retrieved from the FADN of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development (DG AGRI-C.3; data source: EU-FADN – DG AGRI). The analysis period starts from the moment the two countries joined the EU and launched the FADN system (which is 2004 for Poland and 2007 for Romania) and ends in 2015. The research task defined for Polish and Romanian dairy farms was performed with the use of Propensity Score Matching, a counterfactual method. The calculations were carried out using STATA. As shown by the analysis, in Poland, no considerable differences existed between dairy farms run by the beneficiaries of EU investment funds and the control group. Conversely, in Romania, investment aid was accessed by farms demonstrating a more efficient use of productive input.