Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In these scenarios, it would appear to be important to analyze the evolution and
the interrelationship of some variables related with the agricultural economic
contexts. In this line, considering the former 27 countries of the European Union,
the main propose of this research is to analyze the evolution of the statistical
information associated to some variables related with the agricultural sector,
through description of the data (obtained from Eurostat
2014
), and investigating
the interaction among these variables, through cross-section and spatial autocorre-
lation analysis, using GeoDa software (
2014
).
2 Data Description
The first six figures presented below show the evolution of the values associated to
some variables related to the farming sector. The database considered provides
statistical information for some of these variables for the period 1990-2007 and
data for others for the period 1973-2013.
Figure
3.1
presents the values for the agricultural area utilized by several of the
former 27 countries of the European Union. The countries with more detached
utilized agricultural area, from 1990 to 2007, are, respectively, France, Spain,
Germany, United Kingdom, Poland, Romania, and Italy. Italy is the country
where this variable decreased the most, namely after 1997 (this may be an inter-
esting question to be developed in future research). In the remainder of the group of
countries, Hungary and the Ireland are where the utilized agricultural area is also
significant.
The countries with more employment in agriculture (AWU—Annual Work
Unit) are, respectively (Fig.
3.2
), Romania (decreased drastically after 2003),
Poland (increased after the entrance into the European Union in 2004), Italy
(diminishing significantly after 1997, for utilized agricultural area), and Spain
(with a downward tendency, as all countries in general). The decreasing tendency
in the evolution of farming employment is expected, considering the improvements
in technology used in agriculture which allow for the delivery of workforce to other
sectors with more performance in economic scale. On the other hand, the agricul-
tural policies of extensification from the Common Agricultural Policy, after the
1992 Reform, also contributed to this evolution.
The evolution of the number of holdings follows more or less that referred to for
agricultural employment (Fig.
3.3
). Maybe, the data for more recent years show a
different tendency, because the perception in some countries is that the financial
and economic crisis in some European Union countries, as the consequent increase
in unemployment, led to more population returning to agriculture, raising employ-
ment in this sector, as well the amount of area used and the number of holdings.
Moreover, comparing the area utilized and other variables (farming employment
and the number of holdings), it seems that there are some structural adjustments.
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