Impacts of the government-supported investments on the economic farm performance in Austria

摘要

Farm investments in the European Union are supported by the governmental programmes. The evaluation of this programme is challenged through the voluntary participation and heterogeneous observation units. Therefore, we combine the Matching Method with the Difference-in-Difference estimation in order to overcome these problems and to estimate the impact of supported farm-investment activities on the economic performance of the Austrian farm holdings. In particular, we detect an increase in production, land renting and capital borrowing. Furthermore, a shift from the non-farm to farm activities, but with no statistically significant impact on the total income is shown.