Shadow Prices of Selected Agricultural Commodities - The Czech Case

The main objective of the paper is to contribute to practical applicability of the CBA in the agricultural sector by exploring the chances to estimate Czech social values of selected agricultural commodities using available statistical data. More specifically, we try to analyse for which commodities secondary data sets are available from which we may deduce the estimates of shadow price ratios, then to estimate SPRs for selected agricultural commodities and to analyse and discuss the applicability of such estimates in practical appraisal with respect to theoretically ideal measures and resulting available measures as well as with respect to the situation in which the CBA analyst typically is. We selected the following commodities: poultry, pigs, bulls, milk, rapeseed, maize, barley and wheat as items more suitable for SPR estimates mostly because of the data availability and the internal homogeneity of the items, which was closer to the theoretically required values than for other commodities. Under additional simplifying assumptions, we estimated SPR proxies for the particular commodities and finally summarized the pros and cons for application of SPR alternatives.