Approaching the losses caused by imperfect short-term financing at the Russian farms

This study investigates whether an insufficient short-term financing causes losses for Russian agricultural farm and what is their upper boundary. The modified Bayesian formalism provides a workaround for scarce and in-complete data in our data set. This formalism is incorporated into the objective function of an optimisation model so that this function expresses the empirical dependence of profit on cash flow and debts. The model seeks for the optimal quarterly cash flow distribution within a year. Empirical application employs the data from 60 quarterly reports of six agricultural enterprises in the Moscow Region in 1995-1998. The losses per total farm expenses vary from 2.2 to 42.6% depending on a farm and a year. In more than a half of cases they are greater than 10%. The opportunities to improve farm financial performance can be revealed from individual changes in the quarterly cash flow distribution.