Investment Support and Performance of Romanian Large Farms

Placing Romania’s agriculture in the EU context, the article is trying to determine whether this sector, featuring extreme polarization and highly oversized labor force, can contribute to country’s general effort towards catching-up. The first section describes the multiple challenges the sector is faced with, with an emphasis on the poor economic utilization of some 25 percent of the agricultural land and a significant share of the labor force, currently clustered in the subsistence pole. How the common agricultural policy, both through transfers from the EU budget and by disciplining domestic farming and non-farming policies, is expected to contribute to bridging the gaps is the topic of the second section. In the third section, by employing a non-parameter method (Data Envelopment Analysis), we are trying to assess the performance of the commercial farming pole, being known that the diffusion of technology is an important ingredient of the convergence process. Finally, section four describes how rural development measures are instrumental in pushing competitive farming, with direct policy implications when considering flexible allocations between the two Pillars of the Common Agricultural Policy.