ATTITUDES OF MACEDONIAN FARMERS TOWARDS EU ACCESSION

Macedonia is a candidate-country for EU membership since 2005. The EU integrative process, without doubt, will have impact on the Macedonian economy and particularly on the agricultural sector, as being one of the most significant in terms of GDP contribution and workforce employer. So far, farmer's attitudes and intentions with regard to the EU integration and accession were not much investigated. In this sense, the objective of the paper is to provide understanding of the Macedonian farmers' attitude and behavioural intentions in the context of the EU accession and the potential policy and market changes. Furthermore, another issue is to observe whether there are significant discrepancies among farmers and their attitudes towards EU accession. The results revealed that the farmer community in the country is rather heterogeneous in terms of farm and farmer’ profiles and farm management practises. The cluster analysis suggests four clusters between which the variables explaining attitudes were significantly different, provisionally labelled as "optimist ", "moderate", "restrained" and "sceptic".