Files
Abstract
Efficiency of farm assets is a very important
factor of competitive production. It is in strong correlation
with profitability of economic activities. One of the most
important factor of the farm assets is the fixed assets,
especially machinery. As it could be observed during the 1980s
and 1990s on the farms of developed countries, the technical
development was a considerable factor of farming. During that
period the technical supply of farms increased significantly, at
the same time the farm labour decreased, so the labour
productivity rose considerably. This paper, based on the data
of FADN, focuses on the investigation of some figures of the
European Union for asset and labour efficiency between 1989
and 2005, and analyses what happened after 2004 when 10 new
member countries accessed to the EU. The most important
results of the research are that the farms of the new member
countries are equipped at a considerably lower level in general
and at the same time they use farm assets less efficiently than
farms of the former member countries, and the result is that
the competitiveness of the farms of new members is
significantly lower. On the other hand, in the new member
countries the agricultural policy focused on developing arable
farming, so the gaps in the labour productivity are narrower in
the field crop farms than in horticulture or animal husbandry.
The gap in the labour productivity is the widest at the large-scale
farms, which can be explained not only with less assets
but with lower capital efficiency as well.