Farm to tech: evidence on the demand for public support to innovation systems in Italian agriculture

This paper aims at understanding which economic and financial features of agricultural firms affect their decision to participate in EIP-AGRI operational groups and therefore to pursue innovations through multi-actor arrangements. We estimate econometric models on a dataset of the Italian FADN, including the “aiuti” dataset that allows identifying farms that were beneficiaries of Measures 1, 2, and 16. The dataset involves several balance-sheet variables that we employ as explanatory variables in logit and probit models of the probability to participate in OGs and related innovation-oriented measures. The explanatory variables are selected having in mind hypotheses concerning the role of farm size, age, credit rationing, and knowledge base on the propensity to take part in multi-actor arrangements for innovation.