AGGREGATE EFFICIENCY OF RESOURCE UTILIZATION IN THE ROMANIAN AGRI-FOOD SECTOR – MACROECONOMIC EVOLUTIONS

The paper attempts to bring to public debate certain asymmetrical evolutions present in the complicated and difficult process of command economy transformation into a functional market economy, with a special focus on Romania’s agri-food sector. One of the economic phenomena acting as a “catalyst” in the deterioration of sector performance and of perennial asymmetries from the Romanian economy is the so-called “double fracture” that has been produced between crop production and animal production, inside agriculture, on one hand, and between agricultural production and food industry production, on the other hand. The asymmetries of internal correlative evolutions appeared on the background of the relative stability of agricultural production (neither increase above 5% nor decrease greater than 10% compared to 1989), hence its important social “buffer” role. The increase in gross value added was mainly due to the extensive factor (labour) and to the two intensive factors (gross fixed capital efficiency and gross value added intensity). The extensive factor (fixed capital endowment) had a negative influence upon the gross value added. Comparing the dynamics of synthetic indicators in agriculture and food industry with that of overall national economy, it results that the national economy dynamics is outrun by the two components of the agri-food sector. The productivity of fixed funds from agriculture has a higher dynamics than that of the food industry, due to the lower volume of these and to the underutilization of production capacities from the large food industry processing units. The measurements of regional gaps in the aggregate efficiency of resource utilization in the agri-food sector reveal that, even in certain periods of time (from 1990 to 2011) characterized by economic growth at macro level, the regional gaps tended to grow larger, thus putting under question the reaching of convergence and social cohesion.