HUMAN CAPITAL AND FARM HOUSEHOLDS: A MAP OF MANAGEMENT MODELS IN ITALY

Abstract

This paper is designed to verify empirically the choices that Italian farm households make when investing in human capital. Census data from the National Institute of Statistics (Istat) were used to describe the main structural and organisational characteristics of the farms. Multivariate statistical tools were used to process the information in the database, so that the different types of Italian farm households could be defined and geographically located. The results allowed us to analyse the competence endowment inside the family farm by determining the existence, the types and the strength of the relationships between the characteristics of family farms and certain variables which described the specific local environment and the human capital available to the family. At the end of the paper we make some suggestions for norms which may be of value to policy makers.

Keywords

• human capital, household farms, agricultural labour, spatial analysis.