Impact of the SO Threshold on the Statistics of Economic Variables for the Swiss Agricultural Sector

Abstract

In future, standard output (SO) will be the economic variable used to define the target population from which the Swiss FADN sample is drawn. This study assesses the impact of the SO threshold on key economic variables at national level. The analysis demonstrates that raising the SO threshold will lead to higher average values of key economic variables such as work income per family labour unit. This result is confirmed by two entirely different approaches, the first of which takes the FADN data into account, and the second of which considers census data supplemented by imputed economic variables.