Microsimulation Model Estimating Czech Farm Income from Farm Accountancy Data Network Database

Abstract

Agricultural income is one of the most important measures of economic status of agricultural farms and the whole agricultural sector. This work is focused on finding the optimal method of estimating national agricultural income from micro-economic database managed by the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN). Use of FADN data base is relevant due to the representativeness of the results for the whole country and the opportunity to carry out micro-level analysis. The main motivation for this study was a first forecast of national agricultural income from FADN data undertaken 9 months before the final official FADN results were published. Our own method of estimating the income estimation and the simulation procedure were established and successfully tested on the whole database on data from two preceding years. Present paper also provides information on used method of agricultural income prediction and on tests of its suitability.