Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs1 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs2 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network Economic evaluations - what for?

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs3 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network Profit-ability

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs4 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network...and Extensions

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs5 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network Costs down - with no exception!

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs6 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network Competitiveness - more than just low cost

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs7 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network What else to figure out? (1)

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs8 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network What else to figure out? (2)

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs9 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network Policy impacts

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs10 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network Data from different sources

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs11 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network ELPEN‘s principal data source for economic assessment will be the bookkeeping results collected in the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN). The positive features of this source are: This network is established in all EU member countries. A harmonized methodology of data collecting and processing provides comparable results. The differentiation by regions, farm types and sizes seems to be sufficient for many questions. The results are representative and allow upscaling. The end users of ELPEN‘s evaluations are already quite familiar with the FADN system and its results. FADN (1)

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs12 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network But there are some important shortcomings with FADN, too: The access to FADN data is still restricted and not easy. The data sets are collected for merely socio-economic assessment and from this reason contain only very few biological/technical data. The facilities of accessing important features of the production systems (intensities, e. g.) are rather poor. Many of the regions are too large for figuring out typical production systems of special regional interest. FADN data are more than one year old when issued. From this it follows that we need further data that can fill these gaps. FADN (2)

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs13 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network A good complement to FADN data can be seen in those data bases which are maintained and updated at regular intervals by several national or regional extension services, farmers‘ or breeders‘ organizations. They provide many of those informations we are missing in the FADN data sets, and from that these data bases are valuable for ELPEN‘s work, not only for our economic evaluations, but also with regard to the biological/technical and the environmental aspects. Yet there are some crucial disadvantages and deficiencies that restrict the use of these data bases: They are not at all harmonized Europe-wide, and meaningful interpretation often requires expert knowledge. Collecting these data needs much labour input. We cannot expect to get them for free. The farms contributing to these data bases do, as a rule, not represent the regional average. Regional production records

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs14 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network Regional livestock statistics Detailed livestock counts or censusses are performed, and their results are published in almost all EU member countries, but not at regular intervals in many regions. For those regions, however, that publish these data, we may get valuable information about the distribution of special production systems, e. g., or the location of problematical stocking densities. Usually, the regional calibration of these data bases is much more detailed than that one of FADN. In some special evaluations this might be used for splitting up the bookkeeping results in more regional detail. In most of the cases, however, the value of these data will result from the additional regionalized information they provide. Since these databases are not updated and published the same way in all European regions, their utilization will be locally restricted.

Peter HinrichsEconomic Questions and Data Needs15 ELPEN. European Livestock Policy Evaluation Network Market statistics and reports The biological and technical data we obtain from regional production records and the data from the regional livestock statistics do not change quickly, as a rule. So they need not be updated every year. This does not hold for most of the product prices nor for the prices of the main variable inputs, especially feed. We have to pay much attention to the price fluctuations on the product and factor markets, for two major reasons: (1) Extremely high or low prices in one period may distort long term economic assessments thats mainly based on this period‘s data. Long range time series will prevent mistakes like that. (2) On the other hand, short-term projections are quite popular in the field of policy assessment. They should incorporate the latest informations on prices and trends. For these purposes, market statistics, reports and forecasts are useful tools for ELPEN.