Ten Years of EU Membership: How Agricultural Performance Differs in the New Member States

Abstract

SummaryTen years have passed since the 2004 accession round to the EU. The 10th anniversary provides a good opportunity for stocktaking and assessing the agricultural development of the New Member States (NMS). Using mainly Eurostat, FAO and World Bank data we constructed 15 indices to assess agricultural performances of the NMS for the period 1999–2013. Using these performance measures we identify the winners of accession and those who have performed less well. By ranking individual country performances, our results suggest that Poland and the Baltic countries can be considered the winners of EU accession in agriculture, while Romania, Slovenia and Bulgaria proved to have used their potentials to least effect. It seems that a large number of drivers influenced post‐accession performance including, pre‐accession fund management, differences in initial agricultural conditions, the nature consistency and transparency of agricultural policies, and the extent of privatisation and foreign ownership. On the whole, all countries gained from EU membership, though individual NMS used their possibilities to different extents. Future research might change the indices and periods analysed to test the validity of our results as well as quantify the factors which had the biggest impact on different country performances.