Interwencjonizm rolny: pogoń za rentą a wybór publiczny lub korygowanie rynku
Agricultural Interventionism: Rent-Seeking vs. Public Choice or Correcting Market Imperfections

Summary/Abstract: It is generally believed that the agricultural interventionism represents the payment of political rents to farmers. Authors attempt to show that the concept of political rent known as the rent-seeking theory is not valid for agricultural policy. Identification of the whole of the subsidies paid to agriculture as a “political rent”, is unjustified since political rents cannot be taken to include payments for the supply of public goods or those transfers which compensate for market imperfections. A novel methodology is proposed for valuing these items filling the gap in the literature of political economy. Author perform comparative analyses, with the aim of calculating the “pure political rent”, based on input-output matrices for representative farms according to EUFADN typology and on a decomposition of the Hicks-Moorsteen TFP index for the period 2005–2012 and all EU–27 countries. The research hypothesis is proposed that the size of subsidies retained in agriculture is a function of political cycle, but also of market imperfections. Calculated “pure political rent” for EU–27 agriculture is about 40% lower that the estimation of producer support according to the commonly used PSE indicator.

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