Analysis of the Competitiveness of Agriculture in some Central and East European Countries
There are different ways of measuring competitiveness. In this paper, the comparison of production costs is taken as the method and is applied to empirical data. For typical farms in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Romania data on the most important production lines in plant and animal production are analysed. The results show low yields for most farms. However, there are no notable differences between farms of different sizes. The prices for inputs in these countries are 20-30 % lower than those in the EU and the product prices are close to the world market prices. The profitability calculation points out that even under the present condition of low production costs (e.g. about 200 DM/t in wheat production) farming is not profitable in some of the countries. For example, despite low expenditures, milk production in Romania does not obtain positive results due to the poor milk yield. A possible EU integration of these countries could help to improve farms' profitability because of higher product prices and an increase in productivity. Simultaneously, considerable investments are necessary to improve the technical standard.
