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Abstract
This paper is designed to verify empirically the choices that Italian farm households
make when investing in human capital. Census data from the National Institute
of Statistics (Istat) were used to describe the main structural and organisational
characteristics of the farms. Multivariate statistical tools were used to process the
information in the database, so that the different types of Italian farm households
could be defined and geographically located. The results allowed us to analyse the
competence endowment inside the family farm by determining the existence, the
types and the strength of the relationships between the characteristics of family
farms and certain variables which described the specific local environment and the
human capital available to the family. At the end of the paper we make some suggestions
for norms which may be of value to policy makers.