10 Years of EU Membership: Diverging Performances in New Member States Agriculture

More than 10 years have passed since the 2004 accession round to the European Union. The tenth anniversary provides a good opportunity for stocktaking and assessing the agricultural developments of the New Member States (NMS) in light of the latest data available. The aim of this paper is to assess agricultural performances of NMS and to identify the winners and losers of accession in this regard. By ranking individual country performances using Parallel Factor Analysis (PARAFAC), our results suggest that Poland and the Baltic countries can be treated as the winners of EU accession in agriculture, while Romania and Bulgaria proved to have used their potentials to the least. Results also suggest that focusing on high value added agri-food products proved to be a good strategy to reach development in the agriculture sector, while those countries concentrating on the production of agri-food raw materials turned out to be lagged behind.