Abstract

Despite its long-standing presence in the debate, the «farm income problem» has been usually tackled separately by either macroeconomic approaches or microeconomic studies. In this work we integrate both approaches. Firstly, by employing input-output techniques to evaluate both the profitability and the positioning of Tuscan agriculture in agri-food value chains. Secondly, we build up a novel microeconomic dataset of Tuscan firms and assess how macroeconomic indicators are mirrored by the performances of firms serving the agri-food value chain. The results show that the structure of the food value chain impacts agricultural firm profitability