Farmer direct selling: the role of regional factors

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the factors affecting the decision of farmers to sell their products directly to consumers using micro-data on the entire farm population in Italy. The empirical setting of the analysis reflects a focus on the geographical determinants of farmers’ choices as the model is estimated by adopting a multilevel approach and also including spatially lagged variables. The results support the idea that the diffusion of direct sale is a localized process of social innovation, based on knowledge sharing among actors. Policy design should consider the nature of this process in supporting more sustainable forms of supply chain.

KEYWORDS:

• direct selling
• alternative food networks
• linear probability models
• multilevel estimation
• Italy

JEL:

• Q12
• Q13
• R12

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The study was developed within the framework agreement between the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Florence and the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), ‘Exploitation of the ISTAT Database for the Evaluation of Agricultural and Rural Development Policy’. The authors thank Professor Franco Sotte and Dr Edoardo Baldoni from the Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, for sharing the data they used in their study on Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments in Italy from 2008 to 2014. Many thanks also to Laurie Waters for her careful English-language revision.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For details on the data, see Appendix A in the supplemental data online.

2. The results of the chi-square test on equality among direct coefficients of farm types provided in Table 3 reject the hypotheses of equality for most of the one-to-one comparisons.

3. We adopt the definition of social innovation proposed by Howaldt and Schwarz (2010, p. 26).

4. This result held true even when we estimated separately each activity.