Liquidity and productivity in Russian agriculture: Farm data evidence

The Russian agricultural sector has experienced many problems since the beginning of the 1990s that resulted in a fall in farm output. Employing a production function approach and, unlike other studies, farmlevel data on more than 20,000 Russian large-scale farms for the period 1995-2000, this study analyzes the impact of both production (land, labour, capital, materials) and financial (debts and budget transfers) determinants on the productivity. Inter-regional differences such as weather conditions and farm-specific features such as geographical location, management and soil quality are taken into account employing the fixed-effect estimation. The findings show that Russian farms operate under liquidity constraints that lower their productivity.