The Direct Payments in the European Model of Agriculture

The paper deals with the evaluation of economic contexts of the direct payments, as a targeted lump-sum financial transfer to the recipient's income, employment in agricultural policy. Based upon the basic types of subsidies and their economic costs evaluation from the point of view of their deforming effects as well as transaction costs the direct payments are analysed generally as a type of support without a distorting effect on the gathering and transmission of market signals. The direct payments imply that the predominant flow from public funding to agriculture is paid independently from the volume of the present production (its amount and structure) and make possible to choose the best structure of farm activities. However, their additional expenses are evaluated as a relatively very high. The transaction costs are high because the realisation of their objective (increase of the recipients' income) requires detailed personal information. Budgetary costs may also become extraordinarily high in the long term. On the basis at above the positive as well as negative components of their capacity for producers' decision-making processes and their impact on the competitiveness in the framework of the modern agriculture are evaluated. In the following part of the paper the relationships effects of decoupled payments and agrarian markets are evaluated. Results of analyses indicate, the decoupled payments are not fully production neutral. Four topics of influence through which decoupled payments could affect production decisions are bringing to the attention as follows: wealth and investment effects (direct wealth effect, a wealth-facilitated increased investment effect, and a secondary wealth effect resulting from the increase in investment), sector consolidation effects, payment basis effects, and producer risk and expectations effects.

Keywords: agriculture, direct decoupled payments, deforming effects, transaction costs, competitiveness, subsidy, structural change

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Příspěvek byl zpracován v rámci řešení tematického směru 04 Výzkumného záměru PEF MZLU MSM 6215648904 Česká ekonomika v procesech integrace a globalizace a vývoj agrárního sektoru a sektoru služeb v nových podmínkách evropského integrovaného trhu.