Do Agricultural Supports Affect Production? A Panel ARDL Analysis of Turkey

One of the controversial issues in the trade negotiations carried out with the World Trade Organization deals with agricultural supports related to production, which is claimed to disrupt the market system by creating an imbalance in supply and demand in the domestic market and to cause world trade contraction. In this context, the aim of this study is to examine the production effect of the deficiency payments and land-based direct supports widely used in Turkey. The study conducts a panel autoregressive distributed lag analysis for 11 selected agricultural products (wheat, corn, sunflower, seed cotton, paddy, soybean, canola, safflower, tea, dried beans, and olives) for the 2002-2019 period. The findings from the study are as follows: i) Increases in deficiency payments and land-based direct supports increase short and long run production. However, land-based direct supports have less of an effect on production. ii) While increases in input prices have a negative short run effect on production, the long run effect is the opposite. iii) Agricultural product price is not an important indicator for producers. This finding can be explained by the fact that farmers accept agricultural supports as a complement to the price variable in their production decisions. iv) Increases in the minimum wage added to the model based on Turkey’s structural characteristics have a negative long run impact on production. v) No statistically significant relationship exists between the number of tractors used to represent agricultural mechanization and the amount of production.