Trends in Israel's Agriculture Budgets

The past two decades have witnessed widespread agreement that the incidence of budgetary allocations, requests, and more so approvals, is accounted for by both economic and political environmental factors, aside from incremental budgetary behavior. In accord with the emphasis on the environmental determinants of budgetary allocation, we find the gross investment in agriculture in Israel to follow the theoretical lines offered by Western researchers: The requesting side relies on inertia more often than the approving side; the approving side is more political, situating the budget in a larger, more universal, context. The results indicate that there is a relative drop in investments in agriculture under the Likud control in Israel and thus give further confirmation to the apparent Conservative discrimination against agriculture.