Q18 - Agricultural Policy; Food PolicyReturn

This paper aims to assess the relationship between income and consumption expenditures of households in Romania between 1997 and 2022. The chosen econometric methods are the Augmented Dickey-Fuller and Phillip-Perron unit root tests, Granger causality tests and the Johansen-Juselius test. Our study highlights the fact that together with the increase in the monetary income, there was a considerable reduction in the income in kind that ensured the coverage of the consumption needs at the household level. Additionally, the increase in the population's monetary income is essential for reducing the share of expenses on the consumption of food products and increasing the consumption of non-food products and services.

Annually the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) provides support to the farming sector amounting to more than EUR 50 billion in the EU, of which direct payments (DPs) take around 70%. DPs are often argued to be granted unfairly to large farms. In this paper we analyse implications and the political economy of DP capping in Slovakia in the context of the ongoing negations about the future CAP reform. The simulation results for Slovakia show that if the 2018 Commission proposal was approved it would lead to losses of EUR 190.1 million (68% of total DPs) to large farms when labour costs are not subtracted. These losses would decrease to only EUR 12.2 million (4.4% of total DPs) when the labour costs are subtracted. Further, the results show that potentially affected large farms in Slovakia show lower performance and lower compliance with the agricultural policy objectives than farms unaffected by the DP capping. Similar to the past CAP reforms, the position of Slovakia against DP capping is expected to be maintained also in future, which could be explained by three main factors: the productivity argument, the political economy argument linked to the lobby pressure from large farms and low economic distortions caused by DPs.

This paper provides a general equilibrium theoretical model of alcohol taxation and empirically estimates the model. For this purpose, we use a model determined by both externality corrections and fiscal considerations as the tax increase is assumed to immediately change other governmental policies such as labour taxation or medical expenditures. The results of our analysis show that under most parametric scenarios, the current Czech tax rate on beer and wine is below its optimal level and that the fiscal component has a significant impact on the optimal level of tax.