Impacts of Agritourism Revenues on Farm Incomes in 2004–2020 – The V4 Experience

Abstract

Abstract The present paper analyses the relationship between farm incomes and farm involvement in agritourism activities in four countries of the Visegrád Group (V4) in comparison to the European Union. The analysis is based on the Farm Accountancy Data Network database of the EU for 2004–2020, and applies descriptive statistics, correlations, and multivariate panel regression analysis. Results show that the larger share of agritourism within gross farm income is associated with lower family farm income per family worker, and this is particularly true for larger farms. This means that in area of the Visegrád Group agritourism is more important in farms with worse profitability and more in need of additional incomes while in the rest of the EU countries an opposite tendency prevails. The paper empirically assesses a rather long time period, focusing on the four countries of the Visegrád Group compared to the rest of the EU member states and it measures the impact of agritourism revenues on various measures of farm income. Agritourism profitability has been assessed by hundreds of papers but the present paper compares agritourism profitability to that of traditional agriculture, and assesses a much longer time period than earlier research.