FARMACCOUNTA · Farm Accountancy Data as a Source for the History of European Agriculture

Farm accountancy data are used nowadays in the EU for fine-grained analysis of policy impact, but the history of farm accountancy data begins at the end of the 19th century, when agricultural associations promoted the spread of accounting techniques among farmers of different European countries. In the 1920s, agricultural associations and the International Institute of Agriculture, the predecessor of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization launched an ambitious and unprecedented attempt at international standardization of accounting rules in order to collect comparable accountancy data. For this two-years projects I intend to study farm accountancy data collected by the International Institute of Agriculture during the Interwar in order to assess the usefulness of farm accountancy data for the analysis of global trends in agriculture around the Great Depression and prepare the creation of a database of historical farm accountancy data in the future. I will analyse the Farm Accountancy Statistics series published by the International Institute of Agriculture concerning the evolution of agriculture in different countries for the period 1928-1938, by examining: 1.The theoretical underpinnings of farm accountancy data;2.The actors involved in the production of data at national and international level, including economists, agricultural associations and international organizations;3.The data expected influence on policy;4.The picture of European agriculture that emerges from the data.As a result, the project will contribute to our understanding of the impact of protectionism, transnational networks and international organisations during the interwar period, a time of international economic tensions that increasingly resembles our own.