Needs, Modes and Efficiency of Economic Organizations and Public Interventions in Agriculture

There has been a fundamental development in theory and understanding of market, private, collective and public organizations in recent years. This paper incorporates achievements of the interdisciplinary New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics (combining Economics, Organization, Law, Sociology, Behavioral and Political Sciences) and suggests a framework for assessing the needs and efficiency of economic organizations and public interventions in agriculture. Our new approach includes: study of farm and other agrarian organizations as a governing rather than production structure; assessment of comparative efficiency of alternative market, contract, internal, and hybrid modes of governance; analysis of level of transaction costs and their institutional (distribution and enforcement of de-facto rights between individuals, groups, organizations), behavioral (agents preferences, ability, bounded rationality, tendency for opportunism, risk aversion, trust), dimensional (frequency, uncertainty, assets specificity, and appropriability of transactions), natural, and technological factors; determination of effective horizontal and vertical boundaries of farms and other agrarian organizations; specification of the economic role of government and the needs for public interventions in agrarian sector; assessment of comparative of alternative forms of public involvement in agrarian sector (partnership, regulation, taxation, assistance, provision, in house organization, fundamental property rights modernization). The paper provides new powerful tools for understanding the agrarian organizations and their efficiency, and for improvement of public policies, collective actions, farming and business strategies, and academic analyses in that important sector of social life.