CHANGE OF LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY ON FARMS IN EUROPEAN UNION MEMBER COUNTRIES (2004-2011)

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.