Econometric Method for Assessing the Level of Digitalization of Regional Agriculture

The development of digital transformation processes in agriculture is uneven, and the existing methods for assessing the level of digitalization of business do not take into account industry characteristics and therefore are not accurate and not objective. The article proposes a new approach to the integrated assessment of digitalization of agricultural business, which is based on an econometric model. In this model, a comprehensive assessment of digital transformation is determined for each specific type of digital technology according to its role in increasing production. The study shows that today the most important and essential technologies for increasing agricultural production are technologies using geoinformation systems, the Internet of things and industrial robots. The authors propose to evaluate the contribution of each technology to the integrated digitalization index by the degree of influence of this technology on the result of production based on correlation and regression analysis. The role of an individual technology in the integral index is determined by its weight, proportional to the regression coefficient in the model of the influence of digital technologies on production efficiency. The proposed methodology can be used to assess the level of digitalization of agriculture in the region and in a separate organization.