Methodological Approaches to the Assessment of Diversification as a Means of Reducing the Risk of Agricultural Activities of Agricultural Enterprises

The purpose of the study is to develop the theoretical, methodological provisions on the evaluation of diversification as a means of reducing the risk of agricultural activities of agricultural enterprises. According to the results of the conducted research, the following structural model of implementation of the strategic plan development process in the general algorithm of strategic management of a diversified agrarian enterprise was developed. The analysis of scientific works in the field of building diversification programs in the formation of the basics of strategic changes on materials of organizations, conducted by the author, makes it possible to diagnose the significance of an integrated approach to this problem, taking into account the totality and variety of factors that affect the organization and processes that occur in it. On the basis of the integrated approach, a general sequence of actions was developed that would be appropriate to perform when seeking, substantiating and adopting a management decision to diversify the production activities of agrarian enterprises. The proposed conceptual scheme of the decision to diversify the production activities of the agrarian enterprise enables not only to choose rational directions of transformations, but also to manage them, since it allows to consider the change in time of many factors of the internal environment of the organization. The generalization of methodological approaches to assessing the diversification of agricultural activities of agricultural enterprises made it possible to identify their shortcomings and propose a universal methodology for assessing the level of diversification, which is based on the assessment of the diversity of types of economic activity and goods / services produced within each economic activity, the stages of obtaining value added within each kind of economic activity. According to the proposed approach, the following indicators of the level of diversification of production activities of agrarian enterprises should be used: for the calculation of the level of horizontal diversification of the enterprise's production activity - the relative indicator of entropy; the level of concentric diversification - the adapted index of entropy, the level of vertical diversification, characterizing the stages of obtaining added value - the coefficient of Lerner.