New Approach to the Public Authorities’ Activities Development in the Crop Insurance System: Lithuanian Case
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
I consider that the manuscript has been improved.
I have only several suggestions:
Methodology:
It is better to mention in the methodology section that you created the interview applied to the farmers taking into account the specific situation of agriculture in Lithuania. In this moment this information is included in the results section.
Also, regarding the interviews it is needed to specify: the period of application, the duration of interviews, several demographic charasteristics of the respondents (age, gender), a short description of the structure of interview.
Results and Discussion on influence of crop insurance system components on system development – this section should be simple named Results and Discussion
You should divide this section in several subsections:
-first subsection can be intitled: The influence of crop insurance system components on system development
-regarding the analysis of external factors, we can mention several similarities with other Baltic countries.
-second subsection should be intitled Importance of the Research including the information between lines: 475-481.
-last subsection: limitations of the study and future research: you should mention one or two limitations of the study and how do you will develop in future studies.
General comment: Authors should check the punctuation along all the text (eg sometimes there is a double space between words or on line 332 before the sentence is a point: . The structure of insurence ....), etc.
Author Response
We appreciate very much you for the constructive comments. Our improvements according to them really gave more consistency and vitality for the article. Many Thanks once more for your comments, which have helped us to make the article better.
According to your comments the introduction of the research was explained more precisely with presenting much more information. Methodology section was modified taking into account the specific situation of agriculture in Lithuania and information about the survey of farmers was included into methodology chapter. Also one chapter was more simply named as Results and Discussion. Results and discussion section in the first version of the article was divided into several subsections (as you suggested). But they were shortened and merged based on the comments of other reviewers. I agree with such an opinion, because I see more integrity and consistency of thought in the article.
The punctuation along all the text was checked.
Reviewer 2 Report
No comments
Author Response
We appreciate very much you for the constructive your comments about our article. Our improvements according to them really gave more consistency and vitality for the article. Many Thanks once more for your comments, which have helped us to make the article better.
According to the comments the introduction of the research was explained more precisely with presenting much more information asked and discussion was expanded according to your comments. Also several grammatical errors have been fixed, which I found even more than mentioned. Thank you very much for this comment and sorry for the inattention.
According to the comments we have changed the structure of the article. We really agreed with the comment about necessary information in result section and have created the Results and Discussion section and included information from other sections. The importance of the study was better emphasized as well according to the comments.
We have explained existing situation of crop insurance in Lithuania and advantages of suggested methodology according to the comments. Some statistical data was added as well. We have expanded figure 1 based to reviewers’ suggestions. Insurance companies generally do not release data publicly about the amounts paid out to the farmers. We reached out to these companies directly for information. It took a little more time. Therefore, we could not arrange the article sooner.
We confirm that neither the manuscript nor any parts of its content are currently under consideration or published in another journal.
All the authors have approved the manuscript in an existing version and agree with its submission to Agriculture.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
A more rigorous methodology and approach needs to be taken to develop why a market failure is occurring with private crop insurance. Food security is the underlying public good on why governments will subsidize reimbursements of insurance costs. Recouping losses of liability through higher taxes paid by farmers is saying that farmers don't understand production risks as well as public authorities -- which is doubtful for a given farm.
Numerous typos and poor grammar exist. For example in lines 206 and 207 impact and scientific are spelled as "imact" and "sientific."
Tables are not self-contained and virtually impossible to read without reading manuscript.
6 experts (line 418) is a very limited sample size for making food policy recommendations.
Reviewer 2 Report
This manuscript analytically builds the crop insurance system from scratch. The crop insurance system consists of the farmers, the insurance companies, and the public authorities. Analytics of this crop insurance system results in a plenty of important and interesting managerial insights.
The contribution of this study is major. The questions it is asking are particularly interesting given the state of the literature.
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear Authors,
I consider that the article addresses a current topic related to the evaluation of agrictural crop insurance implemented by public authorities in Lithuania on the basis of a proposed methodology designed to make them more efficient.
The article addresses an interesting topic in the context of the increasingly manifestation of climate change that accentuates the negative effects on economic perforrmance in agriculture. Moreover, agriculture production represents a risky activitiy.
Methodology:
The presentation of methodology is very detailed, including even elements that should be included in the results section. I recommend the presentation of the elements stricty related to the methodology and the presentation of the results in a distinct section. Thus, subsection 2.2. Influence of crop insurance system components on system development should be included in the Results section. This subsection includes information about the role of the main public authorities in Lithuania (Supervisory Department of the Bank of Lithuania, Ministry of Agriculture) regarding crop insurance that are not related to the methodological issues.
The folowing subsection is numbered 3.2 (Benefits of developing the crop insurance system for its participants)?, although the title of the third section is not mentioned, which logically should be represented by the results.
Section 4: Practical application of the methodology – is a section in which you present other results. I recommend to include this section in the results.
Other aspects regarding the methodology: Could you specify if the questionnaire applied to the farmers is made by you taking into consideration the specific situation of agriculture in Lithuania or did you used a model identified in other similar studies?
Result section: I recommend you to create a new section intitled Results or Results and Discussion
Most of the results are presented in the methodology section as I mentioned before.
I missed a section Discussion section.
You should include in the Discussion subsection several information: (1) the results should be compared with the results obtained in other studies (focused on other European countries, especially Eastern European countries) by reference to similarities or differences. This comparative analysis of the results would better reflect the relevance of your study;
(2) you should make a better description of the contribution of the results to the development of the field (theoretical or methodological) emphasizing the importance of the study;
(3) you should emphasize the main elements that are related to the originality of the study and how you obtained original results.
(4) you should mention the limitation of the study and future research.
Reviewer 4 Report
1. The introduction part should include some recent and prior work citations and more discussions.
2. Also, the authors should be mentioned current problems, and why their process is more advantageous than the existing crop insurance methods of the Republic of Lithuania.
3. In figure 1 or extra, the Authors should provide one statistical graph about current insurance system participants in the Republic of Lithuania. It will be attractive to readers.
