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Abstract
In 2004, eight Central and Eastern European countries joined the European Union. Their agriculture
was significantly behind the majority of the 15 former EU member countries both from technical and productivity
perspectives. In the common market the competitiveness of products and producers is a key factor. One
important factor of competitiveness is labour productivity, which can be divided into partial factors such as
technical equipment (tools) and the resulting productivity from those tools. The study examines the changes of
these two partial productivity factors in Poland and Hungary as well as the countries integrated in 2004. The
research question was whether the Central and Eastern European countries were able to shorten the gap behind
EU-15 countries. The results indicate that over the course of a decade labour productivity in Hungarian farms
increased, however, the pace of farm investments lagged far behind the EU-15 countries, resulting in more
efficient capital use. The rate of Polish farm investments in agriculture was higher than that of the EU-15 countries,
while the relative disadvantage in labour productivity, as well as in capital productivity did not decrease.