Survey of the price information requirements of agricultural producers in Hungary

Stummer, Ildikó – Tikász, Ildikó Edit

Keywords: price information, questionnaires, cluster analysis, factor analysis, nonparametric statistics

In order to analyse the agricultural producers’ data and information requirements we carried out a survey with questionnaires. Our aim was to study the practice of farm-ers in looking up of prices as well as to measure their satisfaction, demands and expec-tations in connection with the source and the content of the price information. Our goal was also to provide a basis for the further development of the Market Price Infor-mation System (MPIS) operated by the Research Institute of Agricultural Economics (AKI). The results obtained from the evaluation of the questionnaires show that a small proportion of farmers use the website of AKI MPIS (https://pair.aki.gov.hu) when they need information on agricultural prices. However, most of them view the data of this system indirectly when reading agricultural magazines or following the price informa-tion on several internet websites or the teletext service of the Hungarian MTV. But most of the users – who usually look up the weekly and monthly price information – are not aware of that. Moreover, the respondents were not completely satisfied with the information obtained from the information sources used by them; they missed price forecast and wholesale prices the most. Based on their opinions, regarding the price information the most important demands were free and regular access while graphic representation was less relevant.
During the development of the AKI MPIS we must focus on improving the complex-ity and increasing the distribution of price information provided. Furthermore, it is also necessary to make indirect users of the AKI MPIS conscious about the source of the price information.

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