Many studies and government policy measures have been conducted to improve agricultural competitiveness. They, however, were insufficient in suggesting the concept and scope of agricultural competitiveness. As a result, policy measures have rarely had the consistency and continuity. Also, an analysis on agricultural competitiveness factors, quantitative and/or qualitative level of factors, and relative importance and development of factors has rarely been performed.
The purposes of the research are followings. First, we propose a newly defined agricultural competitiveness after reviewing the definition, various classifications, and analytical methods of competitiveness suggested in previous studies. Second, we find out factors affecting agricultural competitiveness and develop an index which measures the overall level of agricultural competitiveness, and monitor its evolution. Third, we choose factors impeding agricultural competitiveness and suggest policy measures to improve agricultural competitiveness.
A review on previous studies concerning the definition of competitiveness and/or agricultural competitiveness reveals some common characteristics. In consideration of the characteristics, the concept of agricultural competitiveness is defined as “the overall ability of agriculture and related sectors to enable producers to gain more income and consistently enhance quality of their lives through increased production and sales in domestic/foreign markets.”
M. Porter’s Diamond Model is adopted to categorize the factors affecting agricultural competitiveness into 5 fields (factor conditions, demand conditions, strategy?structure?competition of farm cooperatives including households, related industries, and role of government) and 13 sectors (sub-fields). Under this division, we select 60 particular factors referring to the competitiveness factors that the International Institute for Management Development and the World Economic Forum employ to measure the relative competitiveness level of countries.
One hundred thirty experts including researchers, professors, the press, and government officers were surveyed to measure the relative importance of each factor, gap between the actual and desired level of each factor, and the extent to which each factor deteriorates the agricultural competitiveness.
We choose 13 factors impeding agricultural competitiveness through a cluster analysis using importance and gap between the actual and desired level of 60 factors and the correlation coefficients of them. The 13 factors are as follows: low capital level of family farms and farm corporations; low capital productivity, private corporations' deficient investment into agriculture; insufficient agricultural R very old farm owners and laborers; inappropriate land price; the low level of effort put into expanding export; consumers' excessive concern on food safety; little relation to agribusiness industry, especially service industry, and low level of clustering; inadequate establishment and fulfillment of short and long-run management strategies; low proportion of farms having a successor; small size of family farms and farm corporations and low level of systematization; and politicians' little understanding of agriculture issues and non-consistent government policy measures.
Finally, we suggest policy measures to reinforce agricultural competitiveness by mitigating the 13 factors.